#listen the first half of that movie i was like. so kens are women here.

[everythingsinred]

controversial opinion of the year is that i dont think barbie was that great bc its message was all over the place and also they didnt realize they had made kens the women in their story so it just seemed bizarrely misogynistic to me

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #405

“today i went to therapy, told him the embarrassing issues that i’m having with my life  /  he told me that i need to change; life is not a video game, so stop playing & open up your eyes”

What was your favourite sweet as a child? Things like Baby Bottle Pops, Ring Pops, Airheads, etc. Do you like to wear socks to bed? NOOOOOOO. I don't wear socks unless I have to. What’s your favourite berry? Strawberries. If you have a job, how long is your shift? I don't. Do you like sunflowers? Well yeah. Are you counting down for anything? No. Are you watching TV? What’s on? No. Do you have make-up on? No. I haven't worn makeup since last October. Are you any good with kids? People have told me I am, but I beg to differ. What if you had a baby with the last person you kissed? We're both cisgender women, we physically couldn't. Do you think you’ll be married in 5 years time? It'd be nice honestly, but I kinda doubt I will be. What is your favorite card game? Magic: The Gathering. What is the weirdest thing you’ve done in public? Ha, probably the times I've gotten down on the ground beside the road to photograph roadkill... More than once has someone stopped and asked if I was okay, haha. Favorite sleeping position? Twisted half on my side and stomach with my legs just sorta splayed out. What is your dad’s name? Ken. Have you ever been on a diet? Multiple times. Do you own any jersey shirts? No. Are you proud to be of the nationality you are? There are two moods I have on this: I'm either neutral or embarrassed. Can you remember what you last clapped for? Omg the woman who facilitates my TMS treatment was telling Mom and me about this one time a tiny snake got in the lobby and I did a lil squeal and clapped a bit because I was just excited to hear about a little snake, haha. What is the geekiest part of your music collection? *shrug* Maybe game soundtrack music. What do you eat when you raid the fridge late at night? Well, not really the fridge, but w/e. I'll usually get a granola bar or something of the sort. What is the little physical habit that gives away you're insecure moment? Kneading/wringing my hands together is a dead giveaway. Do you have too many love interests? No. How much money would it take to get you to give up the Internet for one year? If you want honesty... probably no amount would lmao. I rely way too heavily on the Internet for so many things. Do you talk a lot? It depends on my mood and who I'm around. Do transient, homeless, or starving people sometimes annoy you? What a fucking awful question. They don't annoy me. It can be awkward driving past them, but they're in no way annoying. Do you consider yourself to be a nice person? I definitely try to be. What is your ideal marriage location? Either a gothic-looking mansion or something of the sort or a wooded area in the fall. Do you tell your friends about your sex life? I don't have one to talk about. Would you ever admit to having done plastic surgery of any kind if confronted? Yeah? No shame. What kind of watch(es) do you wear? I don't wear watches. What do you cook the best? My family likes my scrambled cheesy eggs... basic as that is, haha. When my sisters would go to Taco Bell all the time and save the hot sauces for later use, I would use some packets in the eggs I cooked. Honestly amazing. What's one car you will never buy? "Anything that is two door, or low to the ground." <<<< This right here. On the other end of the spectrum, I also won't ever buy a car that's high up. I need a good medium so I can actually get in with ease. What's one thing you're a sore loser at? Hm, I dunno. What kind of first impression do you think you give to people? "Wow, she's awkward." What's one thing you like to do alone? Draw. When's the last time you cried? Not long ago at all because I was just so exasperated over my weight gain. Do you think you're cute? God no. Do you have problems changing clothes in front of friends? I don't change in front of anyone if I can avoid it. Did you like kissing the last person you kissed or the one before that more? The last person. I gotta say I was not a fan of kissing Girt because for whatever reason his lips were ALWAYS wetter than lips naturally should be and I just didn't dig it, man. That and every kiss with him was awkward. Whose bed other than yours did you last lay on? My mom's. What turns you off immediately? Acting sexist, to name one. Which city do you particularly enjoy visiting and for what reasons? I don't like going into cities. Do you often take pictures with the camera on your phone? No. I don't like the camera on my phone. In the past year, have you lost weight or gained weight? How much? Gained. You don't need to know. What year was the last car you rode in/drove? I have zero clue. What’s your worst/funniest experience with one of your neighbors? "Worst" and "funniest" are very different... but I can tell you the worst easily. At my childhood home, our next-door neighbors had a pair of Rottweilers in their back yard within a chain-link fence, and we had a LOT of outdoor cats at the time. (I will emphasize every time I bring it up to NOT keep cats outside.) Somehow the dogs got loose and went on a rampage trying to kill our cats; one young one was killed, while our fearless mother cat, Chance, literally fought them off to defend her new kittens. More were maybe killed, I honestly can't remember. My mom was hysterical and threatened to call animal control if it ever happened again. I was absolutely, utterly heartbroken. The last time you burned your tongue or mouth, what were you eating? Ummm I want to say it was some sort of pasta that I didn't let cool long enough. Honestly, are you shallow? Far from it, honestly. Can/could your parents tell when you were lying? Not always. Besides clothes, shoes, and accessories, what’s your favorite thing to shop for? I love window-shopping at Morph Market, haha. AAAAAAAAAALL those ball python morphs, man... *drools* Does/did your parents ever go through your computer or cell phone? When I was younger, Mom was very intent on figuring out why I was always so secretive about what I did on the computer (mostly RP-related things) that ohhhh yeah, she'd do some digging. The night she finally snapped, demanding I tell her my passwords to everything, and she ultimately found out about me being a forum RPer, was literally almost traumatic to me, I think. I know, that sounds INCREDIBLY overdramatic, but I'm not fucking joking. I was in my room SOBBING on my best friend's shoulder, who was spending the night. I was just so embarrassed, and I *still* am when I share that fact with people I know, even though I have no reason to be. Like I don't do any weird or kinky RP shit, it's just genuine, artistic writing with actual, well thought-out plots, but I still feel like people would think it dumb, childish, and just weird. What song reminds you the most of a particular day in your life? Why is that? "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. I've talked about it a few times before and really don't feel like doing it again. Do you have any close friends that were adopted? I don't think so. Who, in your opinion, is the best thriller writer? I don't know. Does your mom eat meat? Yeah. Was your dad ever on a sports team? Lots in high school, I believe. Do you prefer thick or thin crusted pizza? Thick, by a long shot. What do you have in your fruit salads? Not a fan of fruit salads. Have you ever spent more than two weeks in a wheelchair? I've only needed a wheelchair once in my life, and that was just to get inside and maneuver around the doctor's office when I tore a ligament in my foot. So no. What are your favorite word? Serendipity, tranquility, lucid, etc.; pretty, peaceful words like those. Is there a lot of drama in your life? Nope. I don't do enough or have enough people in my life for there to be. What are you listening to? An extended version of "Nightsong" from WoW. Do you hear any animals right now? No. I'm sure I'd hear birds if I didn't have my earplugs in, though. Have you ever played fetch with a dog? Yes. Have you ever pet a stingray? No. Who is the last baby you held? Emerson, my youngest niece. Do you have any scars from an animal? Yeah; I've got looooots from my cat playing too rough. Have you ever seen an Igloo? I don't believe so. Do you like Korn? They're high on my list of faves. Are you more afraid of tornadoes or hurricanes? Absolutely tornadoes. Do you like mushrooms? Ugh, NO. Have you ever been on Omegle? No. So do you have a favorite M&M? Just the regular ones. Have you ever snuck out? No. Do you currently feel like you have pretty stable career goals/a pretty stable life plan? Have you ever felt this way? I don't know, man. I know what I WANT to do, I just don't know if I'm ever going to get there. Or if what I want will be financially supportive enough, now that I'm really losing interest in photographing people. I might just have to if I want to be financially stable with photography, which would be okay, but bleh. I'd much rather just work with nature. If you could buy an android that was was convincingly human and could be tailored to be your perfect partner, would you want one? No. I don't want to build my own partner, nor do I want my romantic partner to be an android. I want life to just introduce me to a person who is uniquely themselves, who have built themselves from their own life experiences, and not just have a perfect spouse tailored to everything I like. If you do not identify as being “straight,” can you remember back to your childhood some things you did that were, in hindsight, possible indicators of your future sexuality? Yes, especially in middle school. I thought women were prettier than probably a straight kid would, and looking back, I definitely found the natural curves of the female figure to be attractive. When you consume media (movies, books, etc.) with a romantic element, what sort of romance scenarios interest you most? Hm. I know I prefer serious ones over silly; like I'm a sucker for Nicholas Sparks' style, if that says anything. If you are female, do you feel connected to other women as a class? What sort of things make you feel a strong sense of sisterhood or female empowerment? This is too big of a question for me to feel like delving into right now, haha. But I can say it more so depends on the individual than the gender when it comes to feeling connection over anything.

[mymelodyheart]

Starting Over Chapter 22 ~The Tale of the Night Part One~

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!  

Claire's heart started to beat a little faster as their hired Bentley slowly inched closer to the Hilton Hotel Glasgow. They were following a long line of fancy cars waiting for their turn to pull up, step out and parade themselves. She felt Jamie's gentle squeeze on her hand, but it didn't help quash the feeling of apprehension. She'd promised Jamie to stand by him but seeing the throngs of excited fans and reporters behind the installed barriers, made her want to curl up in a fetal position and not leave the car.

"Sassenach, are ye alright?"

Huh?  She turned and looked at him and saw the worried lines etched on his face. She gave him a feeble smile. "I'm fine," she lied, trying to convince herself as well as him. "I know events like this draw crowds ... it's just that I didn't realise it would be as crazy as this. I-it's one thing seeing it on TV or pictures, but this ..." She leans forward and waves a hand, the frenzy screams and shouts, giving her jitters. "There's a bloody mob out there. It's insane!"

Jamie gently drew her sideways against him, tucking her in under his arm. "Some people from the movie industry will be there too, that's why. Events like this like to invite big names to attract the media. And Prince Harry will be making an appearance as well, most probably to promote the Invictus Games."

"Invictus wot?" she asked absentmindedly, her attention fixated on the excited crowd outside.

"It's a paralympic-style sporting event for injured military servicemen and women. It's a foundation launched by Prince Harry," he explained, following her gaze.

Only half-listening, Claire closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally, focusing on Jamie's hand on her arms. It helped a bit to soothe her nerves. For a split second of weakness, she thought of suggesting to let her slip into the back entrance and meet him inside the hotel lobby after his pap-walk but remembered her promise to stand by him tonight and dropped the idea. "Does this get any easier for you?" Claire asked, glad for the darkened windows that hid them from the flashing camera lights.

"What? This?" He puffed out his cheeks and blew out air. "No. The public looks like the giant scary monster, but truthfully, I dinnae mind the fans. The problem is the media. The media isnae journalism as ye know it anymore. They turn everything into a bloody circus show."

She shuddered, remembering her indirect first-hand experience with the reporters and how they've made her looked like the cheating fiancée and Frank, the virtuous, pillar of the society, who could do no wrong. "Tell me about it," she whispered.

"Stations and news will gobble up anything - the more sensational the story, the better, anything for the ratings. Ratings are everything. Ratings mean money and lots of it. Perhaps it really is just a matter of time before they're funding the nefarious for the consumption of the people. There's nae more moral compass, only the most immoral become the victors in this industry, and so on. Morality is for losers, winners are the ones who "pushed the envelope." He looked at her, and she didn't miss the subtle change in his demeanour. "As I told ye before, the tabloids will feed the public some shite by publishing pictures, and when it's captured at a right angle, it could be taken in any context ye want. The news' outlets delight on that because the fans can make up their own stories and they write articles based on their speculations."

"Has it ever happened to you?"

"What? Speculations? Aye. Many times. With my reputation, I'm fodder for other celebrities' publicist, especially when movies or projects need to be promoted. I tend to get used for that end. I'm not saying my reputation was a made-up lie. I'm not proud of it, but I own my shit. The problem with this industry is when ye want to use their platform or be part of it, be prepared to whore yersel' literally or figuratively." He lets out a short laugh. "Thanks to them and the publicity stunts, I've increased my followings on social media, which of course, opened other avenues such us modelling for big-name products even if I've never done that line of work before. The upside - it made me loads of money."

"So, you reckon the network will want something from you?"

"Aye, most probably. But ye'll have yer say in it, Sassenach. This is nae longer just about me," Jamie's mouth pressed into a determined line. "This concerns ye too."

"But, this job means the world to ye, Jamie."

He twisted around to face her, and his hand stroke her cheek. "Dreams and priorities change over time, Sassenach. Ye come first now because I'll need someone who will hold on to my soul in that crazy world out there. But I'm warning ye. If ye agree to let me take on the job, there'll be a lot of things ye'll not like and perhaps disappointments. Whatever happens tonight, I'll need ye to trust me in this. Ye dae trust me, aye?"

Claire squeezed his hand. "Yes, of course, I trust you." She nervously glanced through the windshield and saw there was only one car left in front of them before it was their turn to get off. "I meant to go over things with you, Jamie. What do you need from me out there?"

His face softened. "Just be yourself and smile. Ye dinnae need to answer questions from the press if ye dinnae feel like it. If ye do though, dinnae reveal anything personal and give them an arsenal for future use." He leaned in and gave her a kiss. "And thank ye for being here with me. It means a lot."

She nodded and smiled weakly, still dazed from the surreality of the upcoming moment when they would step out as a couple. It was quite apparent they were both not looking forward to going out there, and for Claire, it was one hell of a circus show to go through just for a presenting job.

"Ye sure ye'll be okay?" Jamie asked. "There's still time to turn around if ye wish. There'll be nae hiding once we step out." His tone was guarded and tinged with concern. "I ken I asked ye to stand by me. But I can go out there by myself, present the award, listen to what the network has to say and if I dinnae like it, I'll leave, and we can enjoy Glasgow for the rest of the evening."

The suggestion was too tempting, and it would be an easy way out. But Jamie could lose out on his dream job because he would choose her. She didn't want that. Claire turned and saw him looking at her thoughtfully, earnestly waiting for an answer, as the ghost of past heartache resurrected in her head. When James Fraser loved, it was scary. The man put his entire heart out with the expectation that it would be crushed. Sometimes she worried at the way he looked at her and at the way she felt for him. It seemed too precious and too rare to explore knowing if it didn't work out between them, the heartache would be greater. If she ever lost this man, she would never recover. If he ever lost her, she feared for the man that he would become. She could only hope that their relationship would survive Jamie's new career.

Swallowing the odd lump in her throat, she gave him her best smile and summoned the courage. If he's willing to sacrifice his dreams, she was prepared to at least try and take this on too before he gave it up altogether. "Hey I'm a big girl, remember. I can tough this one out," she whispered, attempting to sound cheerful.

His handsome face lit up. Grinning, he leaned in for a final kiss before grabbing the handle of the car's door. "Weel, let's do this then, Sassenach.".

..........

Ah, bloody hell, here goes nothing!  

Claire inhaled deeply and took Jamie's hand as she stepped out of the car. She felt like entering into another realm as she was greeted by frantic screaming, knowing it had more to do with Jamie's appearance than her stepping out. It was very loud, more than she'd imagined it would be with a crowd such as this, and the deafening noise was reinforced more by all the shouting, cheering, camera flashes, instructions yelled out by photographers at celebrities, and security and ushers barking orders.

"Jamie! Jamie!"

"We love ye, Jamie!"

"Jamie, please sign this!

"Jamie! This way, please!

"Jamieee, selfie please."

Jamie's hand tightened and tugged her forward, her eyes blinking and squinting against the flashing of bulbs and set of lights beaming down on them. He leaned down to say something, but she couldn't hear over the screams of hysterical fans. Although she'd been a fan of Jamie for years, she couldn't understand the over-the-top hero-worship and grown women shrieking whenever Jamie smiled, winked or waved. People crying and all these hysteria for a retired rugby player was simply just beyond her.  Heaven forbid Jamie ends up becoming an actor. Unbelievable!

Jamie led her to the top end where the broadcast outlets were, namely BBC, ITV as well as UKSC, the network Jamie might one day work for. He subtly reminded her when to stop and where to look as the photographers furiously took their pictures. His eyes were on her the whole time, a knowing upturn tugging his lips and his hand always pulling her against him. He kissed her for the cameras as if it was his way of announcing she was his, and although Jamie ignored requests from the journalists to introduce her, she obliged them, despite herself, by smiling for their lenses instead. Claire was surprised not one of the photographers had recognised her as the infamous  Runaway Bride . She hoped her unknown status would remain for the rest of the evening, but she knew reporters were like a dog with a bone and it was only a matter of time before they caught on.

"Hey, Jamie, who's the pretty lady with ye?"

"Can we have a name, please?"

"The dress is gorgeous. Who designed it?"

"Jamie, a quick interview, please?"

"Sorry ye lot, time for us to go in," he deflected, pretending to look disheartened while putting one hand dramatically over his chest and another, tugging her elbow and leading her away from the crowd and into the double doors of the hotel. 

What a charmer!   Despite Jamie loathing the media, he had a way with the reporters, whether they were women or men. Not once he showed a hint of annoyance even if she could feel it pulsing from his aura. He was evasive when people asked questions but somehow managed to get away with it with a smile or a wink, lending them a sense of mystery. Maybe Jamie was born for this. He did everything with ease and was full of self-confidence in front of the watchful eyes of the public. Whereas, her, she felt like she was caught up in a current, whirled and tossed in every direction. Her face hurt from endless smiling, hand numbed from Jamie's constant hard grip and her feet already throbbed from the ridiculously high stilettos. She hoped Jamie's charms would be enough to tide her over when the media finally finds out who she was.

One hurdle down, a million more to go!  Once they made it through the hotel's lobby, her first thought was to grab a flute of champagne from a passing waiter, but Jamie kept walking and steered her through groups of people, nodding and acknowledging with a smile those who glance their way. 

"It wasnae so bad, was it?" Jamie murmured against her ear as they positioned themselves at the least populous area of the lobby. "Ye look so beautiful tonight, and everyone thinks so too. Ye've captivated the press and the fans." He took a couple of champagne from a passing blonde waitress who was beaming up at him, but he didn't notice the awed gaze.

"Captivated? More like inquisitive," she replied, taking a huge gulp from the bubbly Jamie gave her and scanning the crowd. "The press is probably running my picture through some facial recognition software as we speak. I hope with the amount of makeup Geillis plied on my face, they'll fail at their attempt."

"That's not how facial recognition software work, Sassenach. The app distinguishes a person based on the person's features and shape."

"I was afraid you were going to say that. Let's just hope the software they're using is crap or dated."

Jamie laughed, taking a step closer in her direction "Dinna fash. Sometimes media exposure can work to yer benefit."

Claire looked up and saw the amusement in his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Weel, for one, Frank will surely leave ye alone now. He wouldnae want to jeopardise his career in case ye talk to the press. I'm presuming he'd be thinking, ye've been considerably unpredictable ever since ye jumped out of the church's window. Controlling people don't like unaccounted for surprises. And ye're likely to do something spontaneous."

"I guess you have a point ..." She sipped her drink and quickly changed the subject. "What happens now?" she asked, watching the elite and sports' celebrities rub shoulders together, exchange air-kisses and posed for the cameras with subdued interest.

Claire had never seen so much pretentiousness in one room, and she'd mingled often enough in Frank's circle to make that distinction. The need to impress was so palpable in the air when, in actual fact, almost every individual present was talented and gifted in their own way. It was too showy and flashy for an event that was supposed to be all about honouring sportsmanship and sports in general. The only thing that seemed genuine was the designer clothes they're wearing and their expensive perfumes wafting through the air. It seemed like the long tentacles of the world of celebrities have crept into the world of sports, blinding them with glitz and glamour. It was definitely not a scene she could get used to, and she felt, Jamie couldn't either no matter how much self-confidence he exuded and wanted the job.

"We're just waiting for Forbes," Jamie explained. "I told him I'd meet him here and he's supposed to update me on his talks with the network." 

"Forbes is your agent, right?"

"Aye. And speaking of the devil, he appears." Jamie gestured toward the tall, blonde and handsome man in a dark blue business suit, walking confidently through groups of celebrities. "Showtime," he whispered, shifting on his feet.

She downed her champagne in two mouthfuls and watched Forbes stopped and shook hands with Andy Murray, Scotland's professional tennis player. It was apparent Jamie's agent knew a lot of famous people and appeared comfortable around them as he greeted and addressed a few more.

"Jamie!" Forbes strode towards them in a way a famous person might. His smile Hollywoodesque as he shook Jamie's hand. He was younger than Claire thought, midway through his thirties and almost as tall as Jamie. "Sorry to keep you waiting," Forbes apologised. "Got held up in the office and then stuck in the traffic."

Jamie nodded. "Nae bother. We haven't been here for too long." He put an arm possessively across her shoulders and pulled her in. "Forbes, this is Claire, my girlfriend." Forbes took her hand and kissed it, smiling over it when she blushed. She felt Jamie stiffened, indicative of his lack of credence towards his agent. 

"Call me Gerald. Forbes is my surname. I'm a long time friend and confidante of Jamie. I'm surprised he hasn't introduced you sooner, but I've seen you in the papers. Have to say you caused quite a stir in Edinburgh, and the pictures that were published haven't done you any justice at all. You're even more beautiful in person." He dipped his head as if his next words were meant only for her ears. "Jamie's reputation precedes him. As we all know, he has a keen eye for beautiful women."

Claire swallowed and yanked her hand back. "A keen eye for beautiful women, you say?" She glanced up at Jamie before looking at Forbes squarely in the eyes. "Too bad it doesn't extend to his instinctual perception on human nature. Jamie is too trusting for his own good."

Taken off guard by her reply, Forbes stared at her for a few seconds, trying to gauge her meaning. When she didn't smile, he was left with no other choice but to give out a fake laugh that was so over-the-top and loud, a few people glanced their way. Jamie disguised his choke with a cough.

"That's sports agents for ye," Jamie remarked, squeezing her shoulder. "Cannae live with 'em ..."

"Can't sign a deal worth a damn without them," Forbes added, plastering his toothpaste advert smile back on his face and dragging his attention away from her. "Well, Jamie, shall we go somewhere private and talk business?"

"No. We can talk here," Jamie said smoothly, releasing Claire to grab more glasses of bubblies from a passing waiter. "It's simple, really," he started, passing a glass to her and then to Forbes. "It's either the network and I are on the same page or not. So which is it?"

The mega-watt smile on Forbes dimmed, as he cast a quick glance at Claire before looking back at Jamie again. "I reasoned with the directors, and they've invited both of you at their table for further talks."

"And?"

Forbes tugged at his tie. "They still want you to do a pap photo with Geneva tonight. And it would be wise if we told the press Claire is your PA in case her identity leaks out."

"I'll do a promotional photo with Geneva if that's what they want," Jamie said firmly. "As for Claire's identity, the press or some random fan has probably already figured it out who she is. The fans aren't stupid." 

"Fine, so what if they've figured it out," Forbes sighed, lifting a hand in the air. "Just release a statement saying Claire's working as your PA while she's out of a job or something. Or a close friend who came with you as your plus one for tonight. Or just say nothing at all, and I'll release a statement to the press for you."

Noticing the tension between the two men, Claire placed a hand on Jamie's arm. "Shall I leave you both alone. I'll be just right over there," Claire intervened. She knew how important this job was for Jamie, and she was more than willing to remain hidden from the public if that's what it took.

"No," Jamie replied, grabbing her hand, in case she did walk away. "Please stay." He gave her a pleading look. She couldn't say no, so she simply nodded hoping they would come to some kind of resolution. Satisfied she wasn't going anywhere, Jamie turned his attention once more back to Forbes. "You will not release any statement on my behalf, and I will not discuss my personal life to the press. I've never had, and I'm not about to start now. Anyone who's got eyes knows Claire is with me and hundreds of pictures have already been taken when we arrived. The only thing I am willing to talk to the press about is my work."

"Jamie, there won't be any work if the directors found out you are with the  Runaway Bride  and even more so if the word gets out," Forbes argued impatiently. "We can make those pictures disappear, and nobody has to know about Claire. And it's for her own good too."

Claire tried not to flinch, but both men noticed. Forbes gave her an apologetic look and Jamie squeezed her hand.

"The directors said they specifically wanted that?" Jamie asked in disbelief.

Forbes sighed. "They want an unattached Jamie."

"And yet, they want me to parade myself with Geneva? That doesn't make any sense at all," Jamie countered.

"Look there's something I need to tell you about Geneva. And you can't tell another soul ..." Forbes paused and eyed Claire.

Jamie noticed Forbe's hesitation. "Claire won't say a word. She's a doctor and has a duty of confidentiality to her patients. So this won't be any different," Jamie reassured his agent.

Forbes nodded and lowered his voice. "There are rumours within the IOC that Geneva used performance-enhancing drugs during the Commonwealth Games and Beijing World Championships and she may be consequently be stripped off her medals ..."

"And how is that my problem?" Jamie challenged.

"Well, this is where you come in. You know that Geneva's dad, William, is one of the directors of the network, right?" When Jamie nodded, Forbes resumed. "The IOC isn't the problem, and the majority of the committee can be bought, but it won't stop the rumours circulating. So daddy dearest wants to paint a nice picture of Geneva for the public by giving her a few stints on the sports network. They want you both to host the London World Championship during rugby off-season. Her exposure will unveil her to the public as a clean-living athlete, and so when the rumours grow its head, the public will dismiss it as mere gossip. And also, they want the public to perceive you both as a couple. There'll be no need for you to announce you both are. A few pap photos here and there and the fans will do the talking. You're the ideal person for the partnership with Geneva because well, you know ... you were well-known for your discipline in rugby. No drugs, no alcohol, five times best player of the year, Scotland's national treasure and all that shit. Get my drift?"

"And why me?" Jamie asked warily. "Surely, there are other candidates with the same background in sports as I have, a better reputation and could talk comfortably and eloquently in front of the camera. I can think of five on top of my head, and they're all living nearer to London."

Forbes shook his head as if he couldn't comprehend why Jamie still hadn't understood yet. "You come from an old family, Jamie. A family with a solid background, good reputation and the public is more forgiving with your past indiscretions compared to your peers. And that alone carries a lot of weight in William Dunsany's eyes."

Jamie gave a burst of short mirthless laughter. "And here I thought I was being considered for the job because they saw a potential in me." He shook his head in disbelief and slapped Forbes on the shoulder. "Sorry mate, thanks but no thanks."

"Jamie! We're talking about a million-pound contract here and a place in the network for two years. That's an incredible amount of money for someone who doesn't have experience in mass media. No one is asking you to break up with Claire. Just keep things between the two of you under wraps. That's not difficult, is it?"

"Aye, it is! Have ye lived under the watchful eye of the press? Claire will be living with me. How am I suppose to keep our relationship under wraps? The answer is no. I'm not putting Claire under that pressure."

"William Dunsany is desperate. Maybe I can arrange a better deal for you," Forbes offered.

Jamie arched an eyebrow. "Why is he desperate?"

"William Dunsany is about to be bestowed a knighthood by the Queen, and he can't afford any scandal or gossip tainting his family name. He thinks Geneva being linked to you would shift the focus away from the rumours."

"Sorry, Forbes. It's one thing piling this whole shite on me but ..."

Forbes raised both his hands and gestured to both of them. "Talk about it, the two of you. And I'll go and talk to Dunsany and get you a better deal. I'll give you both half an hour to decide." And then he turned and strode away before either of them could say a word.

Jamie took Claire's glass and set it on the nearby table and faced her. "Do ye want to talk about this, Sassenach?"

"I think we should," she whispered.

Without another word, Jamie took Claire by the elbow and led them to an empty conference room. Once alone and away from the crowd, they sat on a nearby table facing each other.

Claire spoke first. "Jamie, I totally get it. The money doesn't mean anything to you, and I know you love me, and I also know you're willing to walk away from all of this because of me, but ..."

"Sassenach ..."

"No, Jamie, hear me out first, please," she insisted, wringing her hands as she searched for the right words. "You're here because you want to be part of that sport you love so much and want to start your own rugby academy with the money you'll earn. I know we talked about this in the car before we got here, but I don't want to be the reason for giving up your dreams. I can't live with that. When two people love one another, they nurture and support each other. I want you to do this thing in London and build your academy."

He smiled and took her hands from across the table. "Sassenach, I appreciate what ye're saying but it doesnae matter. Besides, I get the feeling ye dinnae like London much and the whole palaver with the paparazzi, and I cannae do it on my own if ye decide to send me away. I'd miss ye terribly."

It was true what Jamie said. She hated London, but she'd also hate it if she didn't get to see him every day and see where their relationship go. Maybe this was a test and opportunities like this only come once in a lifetime. Of course, they could make their own opportunities, but more often than not they are sprung on you like a dare to test your skills, to see if you could take that leap of faith to make whatever it was a success. To continue to be dictated by fear, an excellent opportunity might slip away. Frank already took away so much by inspiring self-doubt in her, and she didn't want to be afraid anymore. She needed to take that leap first, for the sake of both of them. And although Claire didn't like the idea that William Dunsany could get a knighthood from her life-changing decision, Claire had a feeling Geneva was being manipulated by her father. She wanted to be beside Jamie to make sure it wouldn't happen to him and at the same time reach out to Geneva and help her.

Confident she made the right decision, she stood up, walked over to him and sat on his lap. Linking her arms together around Jamie's neck, she planted a kiss on his lips and smiled. "What if I said I want to come to London with you, would that change your mind?"

[novaviis]

// MissArt || Bonnie & Clyde AU \
I thought of this while listening to the soundtrack and I have not known peace since. First off, this is based on the Frank Wildhorn Broadway Musical, so obviously there are creative liberties taken over historical accuracy. 
ANYWAY, the Cast and their Counterparts
Bonnie Parker ⇛ Megan Morse
Clyde Barrow ⇛ Artemis Crock
Buck Barrow ⇛ Jade Nguyen 
Blanche Barrow ⇛ Will Harper
Ted Hinton ⇛ Conner Ken
Now listen, this is the fucking perfect cast for this, and to be honest it was born half out of my Disaster Lesbian Need to hear a woman sing “Raise A Little Hell”. Artemis and Jade fit as the Barrow Brothers perfectly, Megan is the poster child for “movie obsessed and also a little unhinged redhead”, and even Will and Conner fall into their roles. Race and Gender and Sexual Orientation add new levels to the story. 
Here’s the thing though - it’s not pretty! I’m not saying this is a story to be idolized. Bonnie and Clyde are horrible for each other, they get physical, fucking hell they encourage each other to shoot up banks and kill people. 
But it’s a Damn Good story, it’s fucking awful romantic, and I want to see Outlaw Lesbians in the 1930′s being bad together. 
So, now that I’ve got that off my chest. 
It’s the Great Depression in West Texas. Megan Morse is a restless young Waitress dreaming of making it big - as an Actress, a Singer, a Writer, she doesn’t care. She just needs to get out of Texas, to become famous, anything but staying a Waitress. She’s idealistic, and romantic, and ambitious to a fault. Conner Kent, a Police Officer and one of her childhood friends, has a thing for her, and he’s sweet and all, a real good guy, but… she’s just not interested. 
On her way home from her deadend job one day, her car breaks down on the side of the road. Just when she’s about ready to pull her hair out, someone calls to her from the bush. At first she thinks it’s a boy, a young guy in tattered slacks, a shirt, and suspenders, but as he gets closer she realizes it’s a woman about her age, long blonde hair practically spilling out of her flat-cap. 
Artemis Crock is a half-Vietnamese Outlaw from “The Devil’s Back Porch” in Dallas. She and her sister have been in and out of Jail since they were kids. Their father was an abusive drunk, they were poor, and racial tensions never did them any damn favours, so they made their way by robbing stores and stealing cars. In fact, she and her sister just broke out of prison. If this ain’t fate, nothing is. 
So, Artemis fixes Megan’s car. They hit it off instantly. Artemis is rough around the edges, but charming and chivalrous, all the things every “southern gentleman” Megan’s feigned interest in over the years should be. They’re playful, and they bicker, and off the bat neither seem to have any qualms about flirting. 
Artemis: Wow, you have got a beautiful smile… bet you hear that all the time. Megan: Why, yes I do. Artemis: Yeah, me too. 
Artemis tells Megan her dreams of becoming a First Class Criminal, up in the ranks of Al Capone. And Megan isn’t even slightly turned off by it. In fact, she’s completely turned on. They’re talking about getting ahead in this Dustbowl country, about freedom, and doing what they want on their terms. You can imagine what happens next. 
Jade, meanwhile, makes her way back to Will - who’s fucking furious that she broke out. Will’s always been a sticker for the law, but he fell in love with Jade because he adored the fire in her and the good heart that lies deep beneath her hard exterior…. very deep beneath. They have a daughter together, Lian, but because Jade’s been in and out of jail, Lian barely gets to see her. Unsurprisingly, Will and Artemis have never really clicked. In-laws. What can you do? Will eventually convinces Jade to go back to jail, to serve out her sentence so that she can get out on a shorter sentence and they can have their life together with Lian. 
Double meanwhile, Artemis and Megan fucked in an abandoned barn. 
Artemis and Jade reconvene at Will’s house, and when Jade tells Artemis that she’s going to back to jail, Artemis loses it. And - I mean, there’s no way around it. It’s ugly, and wrong, and it’s the reality. When Megan tries to convince Artemis to do the same, Artemis slaps her across the face 
Artemis: Don’t you ever talk that way to me, Sugar. 
And Megan slaps her right back. 
Megan: Don’t you ever raise a hand to me, Baby. 
They part ways. It’s only days later, after Jade’s turned herself in, that Artemis is arrested anyway. Megan visits her in jail, but to her luck, Conner’s there. Conner tries to look out of her, tells her to keep her distance, but Megan doesn’t listen. She’s in love. 
At their hearing, Jade is let out on good behaviour ( a miraculous feat in itself). Artemis, however, is sentenced to 16 years at Eastern State Penitentiary. 
It isn’t difficult to imagine what Prison is like for a woman like Artemis - in so, so many ways. She’s physically and sexually abused while the guards either stand back and watch or engage in it. Finally, she reaches a breaking point. She convinces Megan to smuggle her a gun, and after making a makeshift weapon, she kills for the first time. Artemis breaks out of Prison, changed and scarred. 
Artemis and Megan are officially Wanted. 
Obviously, a life of crime isn’t what Megan wants - or at least that’s what she tells herself. They start on a robbing spree, and it’s exhilarating, but in the end what she wants is to make enough money to get out. Things come to a head when, during a store hold-up, Artemis shoots and kills a deputy. She panics, and through a heated argument nearly leaves Artemis. She signed up for robbery, not murder. In the end, though, she can’t leave. She’s too far gone, both for the life and for Artemis. 
The shooting elevates them to Folkhero status around the country. Two young women, making no effort to conceal their illegal romance as they roam the country stealing whatever they want, one as glamorous as a movie star and the other pulling off suits and fedoras better than any man could hope, all on the backdrop of Depression and Prohibition? People eat it up. Police in every state are looking for them, but they just can’t catch them. It’s the romance of the century. 
The two grow bolder and bolder, making names for themselves, going from small town stores to big banks. It’s during one of these big Bank Robberies that Artemis is shot in the shoulder. They just barely escape. Word is sent down to Jade and Will for help. Jade leaves to help her sister. Will, though reluctant, leaves Lian in the care of family (Oliver and Dinah probably), and follows her. 
This isn’t quite plot relevant but please for the Love of God, imagine Artemis lounging in the bathtub, recovering from her wound. Megan is sitting on the side with her feet in the water, reading a newspaper article about them - it’s not the kind of fame she had in mind, but those articles are just so flattering (they called her a dazzling redhead!). Out of nowhere, just to make her smile, Artemis pulls out a ukelele from the side of the tub, and starts serenading her, just so damn in love she doesn’t know what to do with herself. 
Eventually, Jade and Will show up, and Jade is swept right back into the game. They’re unstoppable, or so it would seem. Will can’t help but question why Megan would ever chose this life, why she would chose Artemis. 
In the end, Megan would rather die with Artemis and live without her. 
Their luck runs out - and make no mistake about that, they both know that luck’s been keeping them alive this long. They have no disillusions about what their fate will be. After what Artemis and Jade thought was a successful heist, they realize that the authorities have followed them back to their hideout. A shootout ensues, and Jade is shot, dying in Will’s arms while Artemis and Megan make a narrow escape. 
They’re tired. In their most vulnerable days, they decide to try to go home and see their mothers one more time. But Conner’s been tracking them down since the beginning, and after being told by Megan’s mother that she’s expecting them to visit, he reluctantly tells the Sherriff. 
On a rural road, driving back toward home, Artemis and Megan are ambushed and killed. In the end, after the car stops, riddle with holes and full of stolen goods, the officers open the door. Inside, they find Megan, slumped over against Artemis’ shoulder. Artemis has her arm draped around Megan. 
Some day they’ll go down together they’ll bury them in a hillside haven. To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief but it’s death for Artemis and Megan.

[harrisonchute]

What’s Harison been Watching?!

9/8/2018 Edition

“Perfect Blue”

I haven’t encountered one of those “Perfect Blue EXPLAINED” videos on YouTube, though I did look for it, and any online writing about Perfect Blue is gonna be marred by very standard Satoshi Kon commentary, that he’s very influential, one of the best known in the west, he do dreams and reality. I just wanted to know what people made of this movie, what their interpretations are. I saw it for the first time Thursday night, and this is what I think: the main character’s mental breakdown caused by the existential transformation pop idol to actress, the Internet, and other celebrity life-inconveniences is then exacerbated by her manager’s serial killing. Rumi just wants to protect her, protecting her past self from exploitation, and because that murder violence is so similar to the exploitation, the main character sees herself in it -- she has to, in order to immerse herself in the new roles and grow as an actress. Ultimately, I feel like Perfect Blue is a more interesting film than it is a strictly entertaining one, like that one half of Serial Experiments Lain I’ve seen. Kon identifying all these different stressors facing popular public (and female) figures is fascinating. However, most of Perfect Blue is that space in movies that isn’t dialogue or action or exposition, it’s like mood-setting or suspense setup, like a Wong Kar Wai revision of The Strangers. I would not see that movie, but I’m glad I finally saw this one.

“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”

I was halfway through an episode of this show when I had to go see Perfect Blue. Not surprising -- I get this way with TV shows, and it’s obviously hardly uncommon for modern media consumers. Every now and again I’ll find a show that disrupts my life, and it’s all I can think about. I was grateful for short shows earlier this year that I loved, like Fleabag and one anime show whose name I can’t remember, swearsies. And yet, I was even more grateful that Kimmy Schmidt is like four seasons -- though it’s ONLY gonna be four seasons. Regardless, it’s really surprising, and it’s especially interesting in the context of other women-led womeny shows of its day.

Upon the infamous episode where Titus is criticized for doing yellowface, I’m watching the Internet outragists shout things like “I don’t want to know the context of anything!” and was left with the startling yet embarrassing conclusion: “My God, Tina Fey is soooo white.” Like, this is what gets to her? Embarrassing because I feel like that sentiment’s been on the Internet wall for ages, with every “Tina Fey did a bad thing” headline I’ve witnessed and ignored over the years. “White people” in media usually just means this is a person whose instincts were manufactured by a system demarcated by stratification: exclusive and hostile. Revising those instincts requires some listening skills, so I was put off by the backlash to the backlash here than anything anyone was lashing against initially.

I feel like Kimmy Schmidt is the absurd comedy version of Cloud Atlas, and the word “absurd” is really the key. So much of racial representation is reliant on “realism,” it seems, threading that needle where a world needs to convincingly contain the token black friend or whoever, and “realism” comes right down to tone. I get a little put-off by absurd comedies, like the short-lived Ghosted, much as I enjoyed it, and I think that comes from my time with Futurama: as that show went on, I started to appreciate the characters more than the jokes -- always a mistake. With that one, the integrity of strict character continuity was often sacrificed for the sake of a joke. Like, Leela is not that insensitive, but she has to be kind of a blowhard in this scene for the punchline to work. Sometimes, Kimmy seems to suddenly know more about the world than I’d expect, but they make it work, because who knows where she picks up these things? The comedy/drama balance isn’t as embedded into the show’s core like You’re the Worst or the above-mentioned Fleabag; it’s got its own logic, like magical realism with abandon, more Arrested Development than Jane the Virgin.

This logic allows -- to me -- navigation through a lot of the show’s spiky territory. For example, it’s hugely problematic that Lillian shot her black husband, because he was a black man in her house at night, but it didn’t bother me (last week). The subject of criticism in the first season leading to the outrage response in the second, Jane Krakowski’s American Indian heritage, didn’t bother me because under the surface there’s that blackened but beating white people heart of “the joke is that I’m soooo white.” Lines like, “The litter in New York makes me cry” got a genuine laugh out of me, and it felt like the best possible version of “Pardon my whiteness, I’m writing a Native American caricature.” I know we’ve had 17 seasons of Modern Family for that kind of humor, but here, it didn’t bother me.

Didn’t bother me. Love that line from minorities. That means it didn’t bother anyone, right? Of course, I’m neither a black man or American Indian, so what about the Dong story line? Issues facing Asian-American men are very different from most social issues, because they all hinge on his penis and where it goes. Satiating AsAm men’s desire to be represented by anybody but Ken Jeong is a one-step process, which is why my desire no longer exists (because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does, and Selfie before it). So it was a pleasant surprise that Dong became an actual love interest, but it didn’t change my world, and a love story is not handled with the same gravity as shows with different logic -- are we meant to take any of this seriously? Is Kimmy meant to grow as a character? Is anyone? Jane Krakoswki does, but does it matter? My brain is different watching this show, where true pathos comes from moments reached upon layers of irony and cynicism and an almost exhausting one-person race to stay ahead of the cultural conversation. For example, Titus’s romance in the two and a half seasons I’ve seen has been touching, but because it involves Titus, it’s expressed with a much more interesting vocabulary than other gay romances I’ve seen. (Though it’s probably relatively traditional and I still just think Brokeback Mountain is the raddest shit ever).

The difference between the American Indian and Dong plot lines is that I theoretically got a strand of representation out of the Asian-American element in the show, where I doubt an American Indian did from Krakowski’s plot line (though you never know until you ask). But I wasn’t asking for representation (this time), and no one else was asking to be alienated by stereotypes. So I can understand the frustration on both sides -- sometimes, it doesn’t matter how steeped in irony racism is. And as someone who’s created things for an audience once before, I know you can’t please everyone, and it’s the negative voices that resound the loudest, because they’re only echoing what’s already in one’s heart as a fragile left-brain writer variety.

My ability to excuse or at least compartmentalize the problematic in Kimmy Schmidt seems to be part of a concerted effort to appreciate a sitcom’s unique sheen. I like that a show doesn’t need to say important things to be important, that one can draw meaning from near-total meaninglessness. The joys I’ve had watching this show have mostly come from Ellie Kemper’s facial expressions and halting, intense deliveries, and I think we only get those with all the other ingredients -- contrarian satire which sometimes crosses that line from centrism to taking a side, like wow you’re so too cool for school you... went to school.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the show I’m most familiar with in this burgeoning televisual fempire, and the creators of that one are constantly listening to fan feedback, almost to a fault. They seem determined to get everything right, understanding that any one individual, no matter how much a quadruple or quintuple-threat, represents the outlook of an individual, and so they’ve built a dimensional writers room and the show reflects that with its characters and their stories. But they did all that because their show is specifically about inclusion -- off the show’s title, this is the journey of a woman from rejected by society to creating her own. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has less of a clear thesis, and its moral lessons often feel networky and only there for some kind of conscience quota. But unlike CXG, it exists in the here and now, with dated references to The Jinx, to Marcia Clark and Chris Darden pre-American Crime Story, and now hugely insensitive jokes about shooting black men in that specific circumstance. The morality feels like a work-in-progress during an era in American society where the conversation changes every day, like the ever-shifting substance of crackling television noise.

Before CXG, I used to think it was some herculean task to listen to feedback. And on occasion, I’ll hear a video game player talk at length about how “the studio listened to its fans!” and cringe, because I know how those fans speak, at what decibel, and with what, frankly, terribly foul language. Maybe the Internet outrage episode in Kimmy Schmidt wouldn’t have stung as much had I not seen it in the context of Apu on The Simpsons. Now, there’s an example of creators who don’t give a shit. I have a lot more faith in Fey and co., with an understanding that her brand of comedy is always poking and prodding. Comedy is observation, and so much of the observation under men’s watch was “other people are different.” Kimmy Schmidt is tackling that head on, with interesting results I ultimately am not interested in, because it’s too joyous and weird.

I never regularly watched 30 Rock, but now revisiting that one via YouTube clips and compounded with a new love for Kimmy Schimidt, I’m noticing just how lyrical Tina Fey (and co.)’s dialogue is. They say there’s zero improv on that set, and I understand why -- the often tongue-twisting wordplay has a perfect cadence that’s fun to listen to and must be fun to perform. Since I’m now trying to understand rhythm in writing, this is one I’m gonna study.

Spent too much time on this, dammit. Little over two hours, I think.

PS: Anna Camp had a few guest appearances and she should’ve won an Emmy for that role if she didn’t. Or, they don’t need to make Big Little Lies season 2, because that sort of upper crust mommy wars was so perfectly satirized by that arc with Jane Krakowski. 

[violetsystems]

#personal

It is usually my favorite time of the year.  Although, I do remember a Halloween years ago when I sat in a corner at a party on my phone alone scrolling through tumblr.  My mom loves this time of year.  Her birthday is Monday and we usually walk in the day of the dead parade in my neighborhood.  Her costume this year is a gypsy witch which if anybody didn’t know by now is part of my heritage.  My Croatian grandfather dropped out in the sixth grade after his mother died.  He would tell me stories of the church refusing to bury her and how he had to take care of his siblings learning six languages in the process.  He and his brother were in the army and Navy respectively.  He married into a Bohemian German family where he had two daughters.  My mother lives in the house she grew up in.  I used to sit at the table on Sundays watching Shaw Brothers films while my grandfather taught me Serbian curse words.  My favorite movie back then was Chinese Superninjas and my grandmother was always asleep in a chair listening to a Cubs game.  Anytime anyone got decapitated I would look to my grandfather and he would be lost in an article about electronics.  The basement was filled with wires and circuit boards.  He was a licensed union electrician who fell into disability.  Before that he was an army mechanic in the war.  Magic and technology was what filled most of my adolescence.  My father’s side of the family was all Swedish, a son of a poor Lutheran minister and also in the military.  Back then, families were a little more nuclear.  My mom’s cousin and my dad’s sister met around the same time my dad and my mom.  Subsequently, I have twin cousins who are eerily double related.  I also have a cousin on that side of the family who lives in Hong Kong as is adopted.  I learned the hard way sitting at a dinner table at a school called Li Po Chun where she lived and taught.  I spoke about music and art at that school to survivors of the Iraq war who openly hated Americans like myself.  I remember my cousin telling me how important it was how I cut through that hate and fear talking about music with them.  That night the oldest living relative was at the table.  It was the first time I ever set foot in China let alone Hong Kong.  Her daughter who was half Kenyan and her son who was half Chinese sat at that table along with her husband from Beijing.  Louise sat at the head of the table attended by a live in nurse.  She was in her nineties at that point.  Her husband had passed but was a Swedish missionary who travelled the world helping people depending on your political views.  I said out loud how it was good to meet someone who I was blood related to halfway across the world.  She gave a hushed and sad smile.  “Your dad never told you did he?”  My cousin was adopted.  Later after dinner I sat with her son and drew.  It was his favorite activity to share.  He taught me Chinese characters and I taught him the Korean characters I knew.  We never talked about blood ever again.

Being an only child, these experiences of connection to family can be intense.  There really isn’t much of a legacy for me back here in the states.  My parents are divorced.  My dad remarried into a family that is very different from what I am used to.  His wife is nice but religious.  Some of the family are police.  My dad told me once her brother had fallen into a culture of online forums for gun rights.  I spoke to my dad over the phone just the other day.  We gently brushed politics over Pelosi and Mnuchin.  My dad is an accountant.  It’s easy to shift the conversation to something like stocks.  But truthfully, I know he and his wife support things like the supreme court nomination.  That frightens me in more ways than anyone can know.  But those kind of politics have done nothing for me in this situation I have found myself in over the last four or five months.  The only piece of government action that affects me favorably at all has been the CARES act.  More specifically, the fact that the bulk of my pension is affected by the tax legislation.  It literally saved my life.  That expires at the end of the year and who knows when the next round of layoffs will happen.  And yet politicians are sitting in offices they were bought into arguing concepts about when life begins.  Which is funny because politicians don’t really care about life.  They care about money, power and how to control the bulk of it.  The tones of an election year are deafening over ideological talking points.  I hear people like Ken Griffin talking about how he’d rather not pay fair taxes.  I also hear Ken Griffin donates heavily to the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.  He has his prize Basquiat hanging in the Art Institute along with his history of supporting the Christian right.  I never made the connection as to why abortion protesters were always allowed to protest outside of that school.  They used to stand there for hours with signs in front of my building.  Years later, there’s a chick fil a right next door.  It seems odd until you realize the money is all connected, ideologically and otherwise.  In America these days, freedom is only attached to religious expression and the money attached to it.  A woman’s right to choose factors nowhere into this.  However you feel about abortion or religion in general in America should fall down to a basic function.  Is it government’s job to dictate what you do with your life on an ideological level?  Or is it their job to use your tax dollars to maintain infrastructure?  In an era where the Senate in America is only concerned about loading the courts with yes men and women, it’s pretty obvious.  The stimulus to keep the economy going is nowhere in sight.  People like Ken Griffin talk loudly about how the answer is getting people back to work and not incentivising people to hurt the GDP.   Liam Gallagher and Johnny Marr are among a host of musicians who have hit back at London Chancellor’s Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that people should “adapt” their jobs during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.  They would much rather get you back in the machine in any number of startups their sons created.  Ken Griffin got rich of his daddy’s connections in times like these.  Just like the health care industry gets rich putting you at risk.  I put my money in the markets too with no help or advice.  For the record, I’m doing quite well these days in my portfolio without any handouts other than my pension.

All the while, I’m trying to apply for jobs in the most insensitive, impersonal and isolated time of my life.  I’m alone in ways I cannot explain or even comprehend.  And I’m stuck in the middle with people I love like ghosts on the net trying to find a voice.  These people in power say they care.  Say they have divine insight from God about how you should live your life.  Have all the time in the world to type their feelings and beliefs on twitter but do absolutely nothing to help the country heal.  And I sit in financial webinars with banks and investors who all say the same thing.  The country needs help from the government to recover from these dangerous times.  A time where health care is so important and so expensive.  Who profits from all this death?   The doctors and lawyers that move to Saipan and other tax havens to escape their fair share of the blame?  The country is number one at dying these days from a disease that’s easily mitigated by keeping to yourself and wearing a mask.  Sounds poetic.  And yet everyone can’t keep their distance from me when I walk out the door to restock my fridge.  They can’t help sabotaging every attempt to keep my mental state in tact when I face crippling social exclusion.  I do still have friends.  Mostly in the neighborhood.  And yet there’s enemies too.  It seems living in this town for years has only one advantage.  Everyone thinks they know everything about me.  They think I’m a Chinese spy.  They think I’m a Satanist.  They think I’m in league with a secret organization hell bent on destroying American freedom.  And they act out on it every day in my public space without my consent because they think they know me.  But they never ask my name.  They never look me in the eye.  They gossip and plot behind my back.  And sooner or later, I just get bored and adapt.  I apply for more jobs overseas.  All the jobs in China.  A few in New York.  But New York is more of the same.  Startups for daddy’s little business school graduate.  A bunch of cock sure closet misogynists who have learned the slick talk corporate snake oil about freedom.  These people care so much about your uterus they voted for a guy who literally said in the most vulgar terms to impregnate women forcefully.  You think those people care about human life at any stage of conception?  They care about votes.  They care about people to brainwash.  Cheap labor.  I literally had to listen to a Bloomberg pundit talk about how a baby boom in the COVID era would be great for shareholders.  Trillion dollar companies that pass the savings onto investors instead of the consumer.  I hear nothing but people banging the war drum to increase the cost of things.  Inflation is a good thing when the wealth disparity is so wildly out of balance.  These times seem dark.  Almost comedic.  But when you shine the light for years from this lighthouse you know one thing.  These people are nothing but husks on a balance sheet.  They have no culture and no history other than burying and exiling the truth until it drowns in the river like a mob hit.  And America is drowning in this cesspool day after day.  I’m an only child.  There’s a chance my legacy will die and never be retold.  But then again, there are things out there more precious than blood.  And the streets run red with it everyday without a care in the world.  What price do you put on a life when you value none of it?  Ask Ken Griffin.  I’m sure he could buy your silence.  Or maybe he has enough money to throw away to silence you for good.  It’s the Chicago way after all.  I should know.  <3 Tim

[morrisondauthor]

“If I Was Your Boyfriend”

           I met Kendall Ross at freshman orientation all the way back on our first day at Richland University and he kept me in the friend zone our entire freshman year. It wasn’t until the last two weeks of the spring semester that he finally let me take him out on a real date. The date went perfect so we went on a few more, and then we had sex the following weekend. Naturally, I thought that meant we were in a relationship but when I showed up at his dorm on moveout day, he dropped a bomb on me.

           “You have a boyfriend?” I asked him. “Ken, why didn’t you tell me?”

           “Because it’s complicated,” he answered while putting clothes in a duffle bag.

           “So what, you and him agreed to see other people?”

           “Not quite.”

           “I’m the side dude?”

           “Brendan, it’s complicated.”

           “Is your roommate coming back?”

           “No, he’s already gone home.”

           I stepped over to the door and closed it before telling him, “Kendall, I really care about you. I’ve been trying to get with you since back in August and you kept telling me you just wanted to be friends. Then all of a sudden, a couple of weeks ago, you wanted to go on a date with me and we had sex. You didn’t say anything about a boyfriend this whole time. Are you making it up so you don’t have to be with me? If you just wanted sex, you could’ve said that.”

           He pulled out his phone and brought up something before handing it to me and saying, “That’s me with Terrell during Christmas break.”

           The pic was of Kendall with some dark-skinned super skinny dude with dreads lying together on a bed smiling. I quickly handed him the phone back and asked, “How serious are y’all?”

           “He’s my first, Brendan. I love him. We’ve been through a lot since we were fourteen. We had a big argument during spring break and we stopped talking. I wanna try to fix it over the summer.”

                                         Me (Brendan Porter)

           “If it’s that much hard work, maybe it shouldn’t be fixed. Baby…”

           “Brendan, I need to finish packing. My parents are coming to pick me up tonight.”

           “Just let me take you out one more time before they get here.”

           “No.”

           “Kendall, please. You know how I feel about you. I’ve been wanting to be your boyfriend for a minute. All the time we spent together cuddling and shit, and now you got a boyfriend? I feel used.”

           He sighed and told me, “I promise you that I did not use you or anything like that. Brendan, you are the perfect guy. You’re laidback, you’re nice and you listen to me. The night we had sex was easily one of the best nights of my life. I’ve only had sex with one other boy and that’s Terrell. I’ve always thought about what it would be like to be with someone else, and you gave me an unforgettable experience. I don’t feel guilty at all because Terrell has cheated on me so many times. But I still love him. I love him so much, Brendan. I can’t picture what my life would be like without him.”

           I grabbed his hand and stared into his eyes before confessing, “I’m falling in love with you, Kendall. I know you don’t feel that way about me but that’s how I feel about you. I want you to be my boyfriend because I think we fit together. And no, I’m not talking about my dick fitting in your ass.” I laughed and he giggled. I got serious again as I continued, “I just think it’s worth a shot. I understand you got your thing with him, but it must not be what is used to be if you were able to connect with me.”

           “Okay.”

           “Okay…what?”

           “I’ll go on one more date with you before my parents get here tonight.”

           “Thank you.”

           “But if you can’t convince me that you’d be better for me than Terrell, we’re going to have to stay friends. Deal?”

           “Deal. Can we kiss on it?”

           “Sure.”

                                                Kendall Ross

           He smiled and stood on the tips of his toes so that he could press his lips to mine. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him. The way he was caressing the back of my neck while we kissed was making my dick hard, so I backed away and told him, “I’ll come back by here a little later and we can walk to that Taco Bell and…”

           “No, I don’t want Taco Bell. I want Chili’s.”

           “Alright, we can go to Chili’s then. After that, we can go see a movie. I’ll get us a ride with Uber. Whatever you want, boo.”

           He giggled and asked, “Boo? You think you’re so cute.”

           “Nah, you’re the cute one. Thank you for at least giving me a chance. I don’t want tonight to be our last date, but I’ll respect you if you turn me down.”

           “See, why do you always have to be so damn understanding and sweet all the time?”

           I blushed and replied, “Because you deserve a sweet and understanding boyfriend. I’ll see you later, boo.”

           I didn’t want him to know I was nervous so I held it together as I left his dorm. The moment I made it outside, I had to lean against a wall and catch my breath. I told him that I was falling in love with him but the truth was I was already in love with him. I started falling for him months before we had sex. Kendall was everything I could ever want in a boyfriend. He was slightly fem, cute as hell and said what was on his mind. It was rare that I got to connect with someone on the level I connected with Kendall. Usually, I’d find somebody on-campus or nearby on Jack’d and get my dick sucked or rarely I’d fuck somebody, but it was just a hookup. With Kendall, it was like I’d found my other half.

           “He’s leaving tonight?” my roommate Elvin asked me.

           “Yeah,” I answered. “I only have tonight to prove to him that I’m better for him than his lame ass so-called boyfriend Terrell. Dude looks like he hasn’t eaten in months. How could Kendall even think about staying with a dude who cheats on him all the time?”

           He laughed and asked, “I guess dudes like Kendall and girls are similar, huh? No matter how bad a nigga treats them, they still give him chance after chance.”

           “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never dated a girl before.”

           “What? Never?”

           “Why is that so hard to believe?”

           “Because you’re not like most gay dudes. I thought you were bi or something.”

           “Nah, I’ve never been into girls. I came out to my brother when I was thirteen and to my parents when I was fifteen. It took my parents a little while to get used to it but they’re cool now. My brother never had a problem with it.”

                                                    Elvin

           “I’ve been living in this dorm with you this whole school year and I never knew you were gay-gay.”

           I laughed and asked, “Gay-gay?”

           “You know what I mean. So many girls hit on you.”

           “It’s actually not that bad. They hit on me and I tell them they’re beautiful but I’m not interested. I’ve never had a problem to be honest. Women get it worse though. Straight guys can’t take rejection as well as women can. And I’ve seen how many straight dudes react to getting hit on by other dudes.”

           “I get hit on by gay dudes and you don’t see me flipping out.”

           “That’s you. You’re in the minority.”

           “You ever hit on a straight dude?”

           “Hell no. That’s not my type.”

           “Oh, so girly dudes like Kendall are your type.”

           “He ain’t girly, bruh. He’s just…different. He’s a little fem but I wouldn’t call that girly. That’s disrespectful.”

           “My bad, man. I didn’t mean to insult your wifey like that.”

           I laughed and playfully shoved him before asking, “You think I’m sprung?”

           “Hell yeah I think you’re sprung! But there’s nothing wrong with that. I wish you all the luck, man.”

           “Thanks, bruh. I appreciate that.”

           “Shoot, I wish I’d spent time trying to get a girlfriend this semester instead of trying to hook up with random girls. I only got some pussy three times last semester and two times this semester. Other than that, my left hand has been my girlfriend.”

           “Ugh, I didn’t need to know that, El.” I stepped over to my closet to pick out some clothes to wear that night. “If Kendall does give me a chance, I’m gonna have to keep my fingers crossed and hope he doesn’t change his mind once he gets back to Alabama.”

           “He’s from Alabama?”

           “Yeah.”

           “Damn, y’all are gonna have to do the long-distance thing then. You’re heading back to Maryland tomorrow, right?”

           “Yep. I’m hoping that we can make it work over the summer. With FaceTime and everything else, we should be alright. Well, that’s if he gives me a chance.”

           “You can’t worry over it, bruh.”

           “I know but it’s hard not to worry. I really like Kendall.” I made my way over to my bed and sat down before confessing, “I love him.”

           “Whoa. Did you really just use the L-word?” He sat down on my bed beside me and asked, “It’s that serious between y’all?”

           “I don’t think he feels the same way, man. I never put myself out there on the line like this for anybody. Kendall is special though. I think about him all the time.”

           “I was in love once with this girl but she played me. That type of shit hurts, bruh. You gotta be ready for the pain.”

           “Kendall’s not playing me.”

           “How can you be so sure?”

           “I just know he isn’t. Besides, he’s not the type to play with somebody’s feelings. He’s too good for that.”

           “Either way, just know that I’m always here for you to talk to. I know we’ll be moving out tomorrow and you’ll be going back to Maryland and I’ll be going back to Ohio, but we’re still boys and I got your back.”

           “Thanks, El.” I smiled and revealed, “When we first moved in here last semester, I thought you were gonna be this jerk especially since you’re straight; but you turned out to be one of my closest friends here at Richland U. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

           He laughed and admitted, “I still have a hard time believing you’re gay to be honest with you. I had zero gay friends back in Cleveland, at least not that I knew of. I learned a lot from you this year, Brendan. I mean, I was never homophobic or anything but now I feel like I have a real brother. I always wanted a brother since I grew up with five sisters.”

           “Wow, thanks man. You’re like my brother, too.” We did our special handshake and then shared a quick hug before standing from my bed at the same time. “I need to get ready for my date.”

           “Alright, man. I’m gonna go hit up the arcade at the student activity center.

           “Okay, later.” I waited until he left before I pulled out my phone and texted Kendall, telling him that I couldn’t wait to see him. He replied back immediately with a text full of smiling and kissing emojis.

           “That movie was weird,” Kendall said to me as we left the theater. “Did you get the ending?”

           “No,” I replied. “I don’t think anyone did.”

           He grabbed my hand and asked, “Did you get us a third Uber driver to take us back to campus?”

           “Nah, I was thinking maybe we could take the bus back.”

           “The bus? My parents are going to be here at ten.”

           “We’ll make it back to campus on time, baby. I just wanted to spend a little extra time with you.”

           “Brendan…”

           “Before you say what you gotta say, just hear me out for a second.” We made it to the bus stop and sat down on the bench under the awning. I looked into his eyes and told him, “Kendall, I love you. I haven’t said that to anybody outside of my family before so believe me when I tell you it’s real. I’ve never met anyone like you before. Baby, I would never do anything to hurt you. You may be in love with that Terrell guy but he obviously doesn’t love you if he can’t keep his dick in his pants for you.”

           “And you would keep your dick in your pants for me?”

           “I promise you I will. I’ll even get my license this summer so that I can drive to see you down in Alabama.”

           “Brendan, I don’t know. I have so much history with Terrell. He’s waiting on me in Alabama.”

           “So, you’re gonna go back to him and let him hurt you again?”

           “No, maybe he’ll be different this time.”

           “How many times have you told yourself that? How many chances have you given him only for him to turn around and fuck someone else? I understand you got history with him and that he’s your first, but if the thing you got with him was so solid then you never would’ve let me in. You would’ve kept my ass in the friend zone. Tell me I’m wrong.”

           He stared into my eyes and told me, “You’re right, baby. You’re absolutely right. I love Terrell but I deserve better than how he’s been treating me.” He pulled out his phone and dialed a number.

           “What are you doing?”

           “Something I should’ve done a long time ago.” He put the phone on speakerphone.

           It rang a few times before a dude answered on the other end, “Wassup, baby.”

           “Terrell, I need to talk to you really quick.”

           “Go ahead, I’m listenin’.”

           “It’s not going to work out. I know I told you we could talk when I got back to Alabama but I’ve changed my mind.”

           “What? Kendall…”

           “No, I’ve made up my mind. I have given you so many opportunities to do right by me and it’s been damn near five years and you haven’t changed since we were fourteen. You yell at me and you fuck around with other boys. I’m just done with it.”

           “Wow, so you’re gonna let them college faggot ass friends of yours get in your head and turn you against me? I knew this shit was gonna happen.”

           “This ain’t about my friends. This is about me and you, and we’re over. I deserve better than this shit. I’ve found better.”

           “You cheatin’ on me?”

           “It’s not cheating because I’m breaking up with you. I should’ve said this during spring break. I love you but I know it’s just not going to work between us anymore. I’m moving on.”

           “Well fuck you then you raggedy ass bitch! You can’t take dick no way, you never could take mine! The new nigga must have a small ass dick for your lame ass!”

           I snatched the phone from Kendall and shouted, “Fuck you, nigga! I’ll come to Alabama and fuck you up, you fake ass Travis Scott lookin’ ass nigga!” I hung up on him and handed Kendall his phone back.

           Kendall laughed and told me, “Thank you.”

           “I wasn’t gonna let that idiot call you out your name like that without putting his ass in check.”

           “No, thank you for helping me realize how dumb I was being. Brendan, I’m sorry for taking this long to make up my mind. You’re so right, I deserve better and you’re better for me.”

           My eyes lit up and I asked, “You mean it?”

           “Yes. I’ll be honest, I’m not in love with you yet but I do care about you and your feelings. It’s going to take me some time to see you as more than just my friend. And you don’t have to get your license and drive to Alabama to see me. I promise you that I will not even talk to Terrell when I get home. I’m blocking him on all my social media accounts and I’m blocking his number. As a matter of fact…” He got on his phone and quickly blocked Terrell’s number.

           The bus showed up and we caught it back to campus. We arrived a few minutes before his parents got there to pick him up. I helped him take his stuff down from his dorm to his dad’s car, and he introduced me to his parents as his boyfriend. They were both nice to me and his dad even shook my hand. After giving Kendall a hug and a kiss, I watched as he climbed into the car with his parents and left. I then walked back to my dorm. Elvin was there lying on his bed while looking at something on his phone.

           “How did it go?” he asked me.

           “Better than I thought it would,” I told him with a smile. “I hope the summer goes by fast because I can’t wait to be back here on-campus with my boyfriend.”

[Disclaimer]: Pictures used do not reflect the sexuality or personality of people in the pictures. They only serve as visual examples of the characters.

© D.A. Morrison 2017

[the-record-columns]

Feb. 13, 2019: Columns

She gave much, but asked little

Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in a slightly different form on Feb. 17, 2009)

           Willa Mae Lankford

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

Lifelong Millers Creek resident Willa Mae Lankford, widow of Sammie Lankford died Thursday, February 12 (2009).  

Willa Mae died as she lived, peacefully, and surrounded by those who loved her.

Her son, Jerry Lankford, is the editor of The Record.  What follows was adapted from remarks I made at Willa Mae’s funeral service on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009, at the Arbor Grove United Methodist Church in Purlear.  The service was conducted by Rev. Ed McKinney, and special music was provided by David Johnson, Eric Ellis, and Keith Watts, longtime friends of the Lankford family.

                                                        ***

David, Eric, and Keith make that music look easy, don’t they, but it sure isn’t. As they played, I couldn’t help but remember the little half-smile that would come over Willa Mae’s face, much like the one on this page, when she would listen to her son, Jerry, or one of her grandchildren play music.  She enjoyed listening, then combined that enjoyment with the feeling of pride only a mother and grandmother can know.  

I actually came to know Willa Mae Lankford because of her son, Jerry, and much of what I say today revolves around that.

A bit over 10 years ago (20 years now), a man stopped me and asked when I was going to turn Thursday Magazine into a newspaper—I replied that I was looking for the right person to do just that.  He inquired further, and I told him I was looking for a man in his 30’s who had newspaper experience outside Wilkes County, and who might be in a situation with aging parents or something and looking to settle back down in Wilkes.

“I know that man,” he replied, “I know exactly that man.”  

In my mind I said “Sure you do,” and told him just to have that fella call me.

Well folks, about four hours later, that very same day, I got a phone call from a man who identified himself as Jerry Lankford, and who began the conversation with, “I understand you might like to start a newspaper.”

The rest, as I like to say, is history.  Very soon, after Jerry began working with us, The Record began publishing and thankfully, continues to do so. There is an aside I must tell on Jerry, however. We agreed that he was to give a two week notice to his employer the following Friday.  That afternoon, he came by my office to tell me when he gave his notice that they sent him home on the spot.  I told him not to worry, just come on in on Monday and we would just start work a little earlier than planned. So you see, his first day at work on his new job was a day off.  Pretty good deal, huh.

Particularly in the earliest years of The Record, circumstances called for me to spend many, many late hours with Jerry Lankford. Anytime we were anywhere near Kite Road in Millers Creek, we would stop in for a visit with his mother. As long as I knew her, she was in fragile health.  As the years went by, more and more things went wrong and she became noticeably weaker and weaker.

But her spirit remained strong.  I never heard her complain, in fact, she was always asking how I was doing—most especially after I suffered a stroke some years ago.

And, she stayed busy.

Unable to get around very well, she was always making something with her hands.  I guess it was from all those years at the City Florist, working and talking with that wonderful gaggle of ladies who we all knew by sight, if not by name.  In fact, one of the gifts I enjoy most came from Willa Mae—not counting Jerry, of course. One day he brought me a package about the size of a bowling ball and said simply, “My mother made this for you.” Inside was a multi-sided quilted star. “It is to be used as a doorstop.” Jerry said.

It was amazing.

You can look and look and you can’t find a starting place, or a stopping place, and I still have no idea how she put that thing together, but it’s beautiful, and remains one of the most noticed items in my home, and a gift I’ll always treasure.  

And that was Willa Mae.

She gave much of herself and asked for little.  

She loved her husband, her children, and her grandchildren.

And she loved the people of Arbor Grove Methodist Church so much.

To Ellen, Mike (now also deceased), and to my good friend, Jerry, I must be honest and tell you that nothing will ever be quite the same for you again.  But hold on to those wonderful memories of your mother, indeed, wrap yourselves in them, for they will carry you through a lot.

Willa Mae Lankford—a kind and caring soul if ever there was one.  

Clearly, she rests in peace.

                                             Willa Mae Lankford

                                    Nov. 9, 1926 – Feb. 12, 2009

Gentlemen of the Jury…

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

Next week I will be performing with Alleghany Community Theatre as they present “12 Angry Jurors” in the historic courthouses of Sparta, N.C., and Independence, Va.

Readers may remember the original title of “12 Angry Men,” a stage play written by Reginald Rose, which was also adapted to a 1957 movie starring Henry Fonda.

Over the years the title has changed in production as women have been allowed to be seen as competent jurors. But that wasn’t always the case.

Even though women have served on juries for over 100 years, it was considered more of a novelty, which quickly turned to critique, with national newspapers lamenting that “men would be only too happy to cede the burden of jury service to women, if only female jurors could be trusted to endure the gruesome business.” And so the “woman of the jury experiment” began. The results? Good female jurors were conscientious and committed to justice, just like their male counterparts (gasp!).

For those not familiar with the show, the plot revolves around the murder trail of a Latino teenager accused of murdering his abusive father. His conviction would mean execution by electric chair.  The case seems open and shut with a murder weapon and witnesses to place the boy at the scene of the crime. One lone juror, attempts to prevent a miscarriage of justice by forcing his colleagues to reconsider the evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

As the case unfolds more is learned about each juror, in some cases, the paranoia and prejudices that expose the ugliness of white privilege and imagined American supremacy.

I play juror 11, an immigrant watchmaker and naturalized American citizen who demonstrates a strong patriotic pride. (George Voskovec had this part in the 1957 film).

Voskovec was a Czech actor, writer, dramatist, and director who became an American citizen in 1955.

I am the fourth to cast a not guilty vote, but not without repercussion. Prejudice runs amok among the jurors, and my character at one point is questioned because I am not a “real American.” One juror even throws up the fact that I ran for my life during the Second World War, taking advantage of the American Immigration system, doubtful that I was really a refugee, and that I had no right to come over here, or even serve on a jury, and I certainly did not get to tell them how the Constitution works. She follows this up with a threat to “knock my GD middle-eastern head off” if I don’t shut up. Needless to say, our characters have quite a row after that exchange. In fact, a lot of murder threats get thrown around to other jurors, making our task at hand seem like the background noise to the real issue of the intricate divisiveness of human nature when questioned with what it is to “be a good American.”

This play is both eye opening and disheartening to me. Even though human compassion wins in the end, kind of, the relentless diatribe of how of a kid literally from the wrong side of the tracks, because of his skin color, his nationality, and his lack of being able to speak English is ENOUGH for the many of this jury to dismiss him and actually be happy about sending him to his demise, to keep the country “clean.”

The absolute prejudice shown in the 50’s is still being shown today, most recently with a supposed crisis at the border. The vitriol spouted in this play is the same we still hear on national news 60 years later. I get chill bumps at some of the lines realizing that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and that we have a humanitarian duty to make sure the cruel side of history stops with us.  

To quote Henry Fonda’s character’s closing line “Let them live.”

 12 Angry Jurors is presented by Alleghany Community Theatre and Alleghany Arts Council and is directed by Danny Linehan. Tickets are $8 adults, $5 students. Friday Feb. 22, and Saturday Feb. 23, shows are at 7 p.m. at the Alleghany Courthouse, 12 N Main St Sparta, NC 28675. Sunday Feb. 24, show is at 2 p.m., at the Old Grayson courthouse in Independence, Virginia, 107 E Main St, Independence, VA 24348.

 Cast includes: Foreman (An assistant football coach): Lori Hirschy; Juror Two (A shy bank clerk): Beka Perry; Juror Three (Small business owner): Kevin Bennett; Juror Four (Stock Broker): Brant Burgiss; Juror Five (EMT in a Harlem Hospital): Zach Weaver; Juror Six ( Housepainter): Charlie Scott; Juror Seven (Marmalade salesman): Laura Kennedy; Juror Eight (Architect): Danny Linehan; Juror Nine (Elderly Retiree): Marion Adams; Juror Ten (Mechanic): Donny McCall; Juror Eleven (Immigrant Watchmaker): Heather Dean; Juror Twelve (Marketing Agent): Michael Bridges.

  Anti-Semitic Strategy at the UN ​

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

At first glance, the recent G-77 gathering seemed like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of the UN’ s largest bloc. The new chairman, with rehearsed political correctness, to smiles and applause, called on “all states” (except his) to end the “epidemic” of terrorism and “work with us to put an end to this scourge.”

The speaker was Palestinian Authority President and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas— infamous inciter and propagator of violence and terror against the sovereign State of Israel, and bankroller of Palestinian terrorism to the tune of more than US $138 million to terrorist prisoners and ex-convicts in 2018 alone.

Abbas’s chairmanship, which violates G-77 principles and the UN Charter, is the latest blight on the UN’s eroded legitimacy and credibility. Created to safeguard world peace, security, human rights, and the sovereign equality of states by peaceful dispute resolution, the UN has been hijacked by an anti-Semitic, terror-tainted political agenda—discrediting itself by violating its own charter.

How did this sorry state of affairs develop? And what can be done by those states who are committed to the UN’s ethical, democratic founding principles?

Anti-Semitism at the UN began not randomly, but as a deliberate strategy. Some historians believe it started after Israel won the Six-Day War in June 1967, damaging Russian prestige at home and abroad. The Soviets, enraged by Israel’s defeat of its proxies Egypt and Syria, retaliated, aiming its Cold War weapons of propaganda and disinformation against the Jewish State—by a state-sponsored vilification campaign against Israel and Jews, and then at the UN, where it forged a political alliance with Arab and Third World states. Starting in 1969, the General Assembly produced multiple resolutions affirming the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”

Russia uses language for totalitarian social control, said historian Joel Fishman. Following the Six-Day War, the selected vocabulary was published in the party newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in October 1967: “Zionism is dedicated to genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation ...attributes of fascists.” In 1975, the Soviet- Arab bloc passed GA Resolution 3379, “Zionism is Racism."

But historian Joel Fishman said Resolution 3379 was brewing in 1964—before the Six-Day War. In March of that year, the U.S.proposed that the UN recognize anti-Semitism as a form of racism along with apartheid and Nazism. The Soviets stonewalled, because they were, after all, anti-Semites who persecuted Soviet Jews, Fishman said. They threatened the United States to drop the proposal or face a Russian amendment condemning Zionism and Nazism—thus equating the two.

In October 1965, the US pushed an amendment to the final draft condemning anti-Semitism, but the Soviets insisted on adding“Zionism” to the forms of racism to condemn. After a bitter debate, a compromise struck all references to racism except apartheid. Thus, the Soviets succeeded in excluding anti-Semitism as racist without leaving behind a voting record—which could augur future charges against its own state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

The 1965 debates critically impacted evolving world opinion and international law on Israel and Zionism. “From then on, it was almost impossible to raise anti-Semitism as a human rights issue,” Fishman said. Thus Soviet political propaganda became a bridge to today’s global outbreak.

For the Soviets, the Cold War never really ended. Recent revelations of their digital disinformation and propaganda are well-publicized.

But neither has the UN been a passive instrument of Soviet manipulation. Israeli Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror recalled how UN Secretary General U Thant endorsed President Nasser’s request to withdraw UN forces from the Sinai. Nasser replaced them with Egyptian military divisions, helping to spark the Six-Day War. And that’s just one example of UN complicity against Israel.

 Israel’s concerted relationship-building with individual nations, and delegations of visiting UN ambassadors to see and experience the “real” Israel firsthand, are part of the solution to return to the UN Charter principle of friendly relations between nations. Likewise, while keeping an eye on Russia, Western democracies should continue to strengthen democratic blocs of nations to defend against the real “scourge.”

At all costs, the truth must be published. What does Israel or the US gain from “dialogue” in a tilted UN that could be better served by bilateral or Western-bloc diplomacy? 

 Heart to Heart

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

The past few weeks have been exciting and entertaining.

The Carolinas are well known for seasonal abnormalities. It’s not odd to have near recording breaking cold weather for a few days and then Spring-like weather. Just enough to tease our spring flowering plant life and then in the twinkling of an eye it’s cold again.

So, it goes in the Carolinas, we are people with many layers, and those layers come in handy during our winter months. We also love metaphors, and a colorful story fills the need we have to be a good storyteller or a great listener. The need for both is never-ending.

While in the barber’s chair last week, Garry, my barber, had big news. It looks like he may have a brother he is just now learning about. I asked him if he was excited about having a new brother. He said he was; however, the idea is so new he is still processing the emotions that come along with such a discovery.

Josh, Garry’s son and the fellow barber said they have been invited to visit their new northern family member.  Garry is not much for long-distance travel; his heart indeed is in the Carolinas, and he is not excited about venturing too far away from the land he calls home.  

In the style of true Southern Hospitality, an invitation will soon be extended to the brother from afar. From what I understand hints have already been given by the new brother that suggest an invite and visit to the Carolinas would be welcomed.  

Bill Barns ask for my thoughts on his new book that is in the final stages before publishing. The first sentence of Chapter One is “One beautiful, moonlit night, a young mother opossum known as Oden was out in the woods foraging for food.”  

I plan to read every word.

I had the opportunity to take in a few live shows. One was an open mic night at The 1915 in Wilkesboro, and the other was at the Reeves Theater in Elkin NC. The Reeves Theater is the subject of one of our broadcast segments that we are calling The Carolina Theater Trail. The segment series will be part of our Life In The Carolinas syndicated show. Over the next few years, we will be producing segments on historically significant Theaters in the Carolinas. We have a good variety of theaters to choose, and each one plays a vital role in our charming towns in the Carolinas.

I enjoyed dinner with Ken Welborn, publisher, and friend who loves the Carolinas with a strong focus on Wilkes County. It’s never a dull visit with Ken. The food and service at Sixth and Main in North Wilkesboro is excellent. I enjoyed the crab cakes with asparagus and baby potatoes. Ken dined on and spoke well about the salmon and vegetables. I think digestion works better when you have dinner with a well-seasoned storyteller.

In celebration of February as the Heart Month, we had Dr. Julian Thomas as a guest on the Life In The Carolinas Podcast. We titled the episode Heart to Heart. The special show focused on the journey of dealing with matters of the heart. Dr. Thomas is brilliant, and his approach to healthcare is driven by promoting awareness and a passion for healing.

Wherever we find ourselves, it’s a good idea to stop for a moment and share our lives with those we are around. The love month can be demanding, but it can also be gentle, kind and full of passion.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

 Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My40. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com.

[bluewatsons]

Nathaniel Rich, James Ellroy, The Art of Fiction No. 201, The Paris Review (Fall 2009)

Interviewer: You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why’d you come back?

James Ellroy: One reason--Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

Interviewer: Did you miss the city?

James Ellroy: While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Interviewer: What’s wrong with LA now?

James Ellroy: I fear the sloth, the disorder, and the moral depravity. It makes me want to hole up in my pad for days on end.

Interviewer: And what about the LA of the fifties has a hold on you?

James Ellroy: A lot of it is simple biography. I lived here, so I was obsessed with my immediate environment. I am from Los Angeles truly, immutably. It’s the first thing you get in any author’s note; James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. I was hatched in the film-noir epicenter, at the height of the film-noir era. My parents and I lived near Hollywood. My father and mother had a tenuous connection to the film business. They were both uncommonly good-looking, which may be a hallmark of LA arrivistes, and they were of that generation of migrants who came because they were very poor and LA was a beautiful place. I grew up in a different world, a different America. You didn’t have to make a lot of dough to keep a roof over your head. There was a calmness that I recall too. I learned to amuse myself. I liked to read. I liked to look out the window. It’s rare for me to speak about LA epigrammatically. I don’t view it as a strange place, I don’t view it as a hot-pot of multiculturalism or weird sexuality. I have never studied it formally. There are big swathes of LA that I don’t even know my way around today. I’m not quite sure how you get to Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach. I don’t know LA on a valid historical level at all. But I have assimilated it in a deeper way. I had lived here for so long that when it became time to exploit my memory of the distant past, it was easy. Whatever power my books have derives from the fact that they are utterly steeped in the eras that I describe. LA of that period is mine and nobody else’s. If you wrote about this period before me, I have taken it away from you.

Interviewer: What did your parents do?

James Ellroy: My mother was a registered nurse. She worked a lot. At one point she had a job at a Jewish nursing home where movie stars brought their aging parents. She was fluent in German, and when the patients spoke about her in Yiddish, behind her back, she could understand them. She was a big reader of historical novels, and she was always listening to one specific Brahms piano concerto—I remember a blue RCA Victor record. I have more memories of my dad. He was a dipshit studio gofer, a big handsome guy, a scratch golfer. He worked for a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He was always snoozing on the couch, like Dagwood Bumstead. He was a lazy motherfucker. God bless him. He was always working on some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. This is what my dad was like. I’d say, Hey, Dad, we studied penguins today in school. He’d say, Yeah? I’m a penguin fucker from way back. Dad, I saw a giraffe at the zoo today. Yeah? I’m a giraffe fucker from way back. That’s my dad. My dad was a giraffe fucker. He said to me once, I fucked Rita Hayworth. He said that he once introduced me to Hayworth at the Tail O’the Pup, circa 1950. I would have been two years old at the time, but I don’t recall it. He said I spilled grape juice all over her. I never believed that he had worked for Hayworth, but after his death I saw his name in a Hayworth biography. Sure enough, for a period of time, he was her business manager.

Interviewer: You have said you dislike profanity, but you use it a lot.

James Ellroy: I learned it from my father. He was raucous, profane, and freewheeling. I say fuck routinely—my generation is the first generation to say the word routinely, across gender lines. I love slang. I love hipster patois, racial invective, alliteration, argot of all kinds.

Interviewer: What was your childhood like before your mother’s death?

James Ellroy: I don’t remember a single amicable moment between my parents other than this--mother passing steaks out the kitchen window to my father so that he could put them on a barbecue. I had my mother’s number. I understood that she was maudlin, effusive, and enraged—the degree depending on how much booze she had in her system. I also understood that she had my father’s number—that he was lazy and cowardly. There was always something incongruous about them. Early on, I was aware of the seventeen-year age gap. When I knew her, my mother was a very good-looking redhead in her early forties. My father was a sun-ravaged, hard-smoking, hard-living guy. He looked significantly older at sixty than I do now. Everybody thought he was my granddad. He wore clothes that were thirty years out of style. I remember that he had a gold Omega wristwatch that he loved. We were broke, and then all of a sudden, one day, the watch wasn’t there. That broke my heart.

Interviewer: In My Dark Places you describe a sense of foreboding not long before your mother’s murder. Where did that come from?

James Ellroy: Near the end of January 1958, my mother sits me down on the couch. She’s half blitzed, and I can tell. She says, Honey, you’ve never lived in a house before, so we’re going to move to a nice little town called El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley. I sensed that there was some other, more sinister reason we were moving to El Monte, but I still haven’t figured it out. I think she was running away from something, or someone. We go out there, and it was very upsetting. It was a dirty little stone house with a single bathroom. It was half the size of the apartment that we had in Santa Monica. Five months later, I come back from a weekend with my father. He put me in a cab at the El Monte bus depot. The cab pulls up to my street, our little stone house is on the left, and there are men in brown uniforms and gray suits standing around. And right then, I knew it, my mother was dead. I knew it in that moment. Someone said, There’s the kid. A cop got down on my level and said, Son, your mother’s been killed. I swooned. My field of vision veered off in one direction. But I didn’t cry. I started calculating. I began performing almost immediately. I loved being the center of attention. The cops took me to our neighbor’s garage, and they took a photograph—often reproduced—of me standing in front of a workbench. I was goofing, mugging and making faces. The El Monte police chief was dispatched to pick up my dad. Of course, he was the first suspect. At the police station, they sequestered my dad and me in separate rooms. They gave me a candy bar. When they finally let my dad out, I ran to him and put my arms around him. We went back to his pad on the freeway bus. I recall a stream of cars going by with their lights on in the opposite direction, and I forced myself to cry for just a few minutes. I remember thinking that I should. I was already at a great emotional distance from my mother’s death. When I got back to my dad’s crib, I immediately fell asleep. I woke up on Monday morning, June 23, 1958, and I swear to you, the whole world seemed light powder blue, like a ’56 Chevy Bel Air.

Interviewer: It sounds like you were in a state of shock.

James Ellroy: It technically could have been a state of shock. I had a nervous breakdown much later in life, and I’m still subject to panic attacks; big swells of emotion and anxiety, an aging person’s unsuppressable fear of catastrophe and death. All I can tell you is what went through my mind at the time. I couldn’t express my thoughts about my mother, because my relationship with her was too compromised. I thought, I got what I wanted. My mother is dead. Now what do I do? I felt death all around me. For a period of some weeks, my dad was very permissive. I began to wonder how much time he had left. I’d stay up late watching TV, waiting for him to come back from sporadic all-night accounting jobs—if indeed he wasn’t out fucking every woman who’d let him. I began to read mystery books--the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt. My father would buy me two of these things a week. I could read the damn books in four or five hours. I started stealing them when I was ten years old. At the time I had no creative outlet, no indication of genius or a literary gift. I was fearful and occasionally violent, physically outsized, and out of my mind. But I knew right then that I had discovered a secret world.

Interviewer: Were you lonely in those years?

James Ellroy: Yes, but I enjoyed junior high. That’s where I began to perform for the first time. I was a provocateur. I gave oral reports on books that I had invented in my head. I’m a huge kid, I don’t do well in school, I’m girl crazed, and I’m already peeping in windows. Here we are in this cheap apartment, no air-conditioning, and an unhousebroken dog. One block away, a bunch of Tudor mansions. They’re there, and I’m here. I want the girls, I want the family life, I want something that isn’t malodorous and fucked-up.

Interviewer: Is your voyeuristic impulse related to your need to write and tell stories—to go into the lives of fictional characters?

James Ellroy: Those impulses are one and the same. I already had the massive creative will. Now the performer in me is starting to act up. How do you stand out as a kid with no gifts at all? How do you enact your estrangement, your alienation, your self-loathing, your feelings of oddness and being unloved? The status quo at John Burroughs Junior High School was Jewish, so I shouted, Heil Hitler. I’d say, Bomb Russia, I hate JFK, fuck the liberal hegemony. Of course, I never hated anyone, and most of my friends were Jewish. I got significantly crazier. I joined the American Nazi Party while I was at Fairfax High School. I painted swastikas on the dog’s water dish. I always had a flash roll. My dad would give me a twenty-dollar bill to go to the store. I’d steal the food and I’d bring him change for a ten. I watched The Fugitive religiously on TV. If you’ve seen the original run of the series, it is all about sex and dislocated men and women. They drink highballs, smoke cigarettes, and sizzle for each other every Tuesday night at ten. It was everything that I wanted.

Interviewer: You claim to be ignorant of contemporary pop culture, but it seems that you were completely immersed in it as a boy.

James Ellroy: I was, but back then I didn’t know what it meant. I just felt compelled to read, go to crime movies, and watch crime television shows.

Interviewer: What does it mean to you now? Why is crime an important subject in American fiction?

James Ellroy: We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the shit out of the reader.

Interviewer: You’ve said film noir hasn’t influenced your writing, but you watched a lot of it in your formative years—and you say you were born and raised in the heart of film-noir culture.

James Ellroy: I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You’re fucked. There are a few very fine films--Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and, of course, Out of the Past. Robert Mitchum sees Jane Greer in Acapulco, and he knows. She sees him, and she knows. He’s passive, inert, but very resourceful. She’s murderous and altogether monstrous. He just wants to forfeit to a woman, to give up his masculinity. She wants to be enveloped in her masculine side. They each want the other. When film noir is deeply about that, it can be very powerful. But noir is overexposed now. I’m over it.

Interviewer: You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

James Ellroy: Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me. Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important, too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.

Interviewer: How did you do in high school?

James Ellroy: I did poorly, and I had an unimaginably dim social sense. I was horrified when the civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in ’64, but I made light of it in school. I knew it was wrong, but I had to be superior to the events themselves. You can see this in my books. There’s the reactionary side of me as well as the critique of authority, the critique of racism and oppression. Back then, though, I possessed no social awareness.

Interviewer: Did you graduate?

James Ellroy: No. I flunked the eleventh grade and got expelled. I decided I wanted to join the marine corps, because I wanted to be a shit kicker, which I certainly was not. I did not want to go to Vietnam, I never thought about Vietnam. I had a vague desire to shoot guns. My father’s health was deteriorating ever more rapidly—he started having strokes and heart attacks—and he let me enlist in the army.

Interviewer: How long did you last?

James Ellroy: If you think I’m skinny now, at a hundred and seventy pounds, picture me at a hundred and forty. I got shipped out to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Flying bugs all over the place. Right away, I went from being a big egotistical bully to a craven scaredy-cat dipshit. My dad had another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.

Interviewer: Is that when you started writing—after your father died?

James Ellroy: The first thing I did after he died was snag his last three Social Security checks, forge his signature, and cash them at a liquor store. From ’65 to ’75, I drank and used drugs. I fantasized. I swallowed amphetamine inhalers. I masturbated compulsively. I got into fights. I boxed—though I was terrible at it—and I broke into houses. I’d steal girls’ panties, I’d jack off, grab cash out of wallets and purses. The method was easy--you call a house and if nobody answers, that means nobody’s home. I’d stick my long, skinny arms in a pet access door and flip the latch, or find a window that was loose and raise it open. Everybody has pills and alcohol. I’d pop a Seconal, drink four fingers of Scotch, eat some cheese out of the fridge, steal a ten-dollar bill, then leave a window ajar and skedaddle. I did time in county jail for useless misdemeanors. I was arrested once for burglary, but it got popped down to misdemeanor trespassing. The press thinks that I’m a larger-than-life guy. Yes, that’s true. But a lot of the shit written about me discusses this part of my life disproportionately.

Interviewer: Aren’t you responsible for this? You’ve written a lot about this period, and you frequently talk about it in interviews.

James Ellroy: I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

Interviewer: Still, writing couldn’t have been exactly in the forefront of your mind at the time.

James Ellroy: But it was. I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist. I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. I had a fantasy of what it meant to be a writer--the sports cars, the clothes, the women. But I think what appealed to me most about it was that I could assume the identity of what I really loved to do, which was to read. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a novel. I didn’t live in the world of graduate writing schools. I wasn’t part of any scene or creative community. I happened to love crime novels more than anything, so I wrote a crime novel first. I didn’t buy the old canard that you had to start by writing short stories, and only later write a novel. I never liked reading short stories, so why the fuck should I want to write one? I only wanted to write novels.

Interviewer: Did you feel that your period of homelessness and delinquency was giving you experience that you could turn into a novel?

James Ellroy: If I did, it was false. The real education I had was from the books I read and TV shows and movies I saw. When I watched a film or read a book, I was engrossed. I learned in an unmediated way. I didn’t know what I was taking in—I wasn’t thinking about theme, content, or style—but I took it all in.

Interviewer: You started caddying at golf courses near the end of that period. Did you think you needed the stability of a paying job in order to write?

James Ellroy: What happened was that I quit drinking. I knew I couldn’t write a novel as long as I drank or used drugs. And I was on fire with a sense of urgency. A buddy took me to an AA meeting, and I quit drinking in June of 1975. I continued taking uppers and smoking weed up until August 1, 1977. That’s when I really got sober. I started writing a year and five months later, in late January of 1979. I was not quite thirty-one.

Interviewer: Did you have an idea for a novel? Or just the general notion that you wanted to write one?

James Ellroy: I concocted a story idea. A friend of mine at the country club had taken a job as a process server. He asked me to come work for him. He said it was fun. So I went out as a process server and looked for a couple of witnesses that we never found. It was like being a private eye. I was a big guy in a suit. I started to plan a novel about a guy who gets involved with a bunch of country-club golf caddies, who does some process serving, who grew up at Beverly and Western, who was a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy with glasses, all of which is me. But he was an ex-cop, which I am not. I invented a nice arsonist—a psychotic, anti-Semitic firebug named Fat Dog Baker. I knew a caddy who was called Fat Dog who slept on golf courses. That’s Brown’s Requiem. It’s wish fulfillment, it’s crime, it’s autobiography. But it’s mostly a work of imagination.

Interviewer: How, after fourteen years of telling yourself that you were a writer, did you actually begin to write?

James Ellroy: I was on the eighth hole at Bel-Air Country Club and I said, Please, God, let me start this novel tonight. And I did. Standing up at the Westwood Hotel, where I had a room. Using the dresser as a desk, I wrote, “Business was good. It was the same thing every summer. The smog and heat rolled in, blanketing the basin; people succumbed to torpor and malaise; old resolves died; old commitments went unheeded. And I profited . . .” Native talent—who knows? I sat down and did it—and I had it. The beast was loose. I felt like I had created myself entirely out of sheer will, egotism, and an overwhelming desire to be somebody. All of a sudden I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I haven’t stopped since.

Interviewer: What did you learn from your early novels?

James Ellroy: When to use first person versus third person. How to set a scene. Where to put a line break or a new paragraph. How to write an ending. How to develop a tragic sense of the world. Where to put a love scene. When to stress autobiography. When to realize you’re actually not that important.

Interviewer: What inspired you to write Killer on the Road, a novel told from the perspective of a homosexual serial killer?

James Ellroy: Killer on the Road is the only book I ever wrote for the money, because I needed some dough. It was my first large advance, ten grand. In part, I was influenced by Thomas Harris’s brilliant Red Dragon—to me the best pure thriller I’ve ever read. With Killer on the Road, I deliberately set out to shock. I wrote it in four months. It’s the only one of my books that I regret.

Interviewer: Why is that?

James Ellroy: It’s a good book, but I had a hot date with Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia victim—and I wanted to get to her fast. The Black Dahlia had been building inside of me for a long time. I became obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case shortly after my mother’s death. I didn’t openly mourn my mother, but I could mourn Betty Short.

Interviewer: Why did it take so long for you to turn to the Black Dahlia case in your writing? It’s your seventh novel, after all.

James Ellroy: Because I thought for a long time that the success of John Gregory Dunne’s novel about the Black Dahlia, True Confessions, would preclude a successful publication. That’s a wonderful novel, but it doesn’t truly adhere to the facts of the Black Dahlia murder case. Mr. Dunne calls the Black Dahlia “the Virgin Tramp.” Elizabeth Short becomes “Lois Fazenda.” When I took on the murder for my novel, ten years later, I adhered to the facts of the case more than Mr. Dunne did. His book is phantasmagoria. My book is a much more literal rendering of the truth.

Interviewer: How did that book change your career?

James Ellroy: It liberated me. It was a best seller, I was earning a living as a writer for the first time, and I was exponentially more committed to creative maturity. I’m the most serious guy on earth, but I can bullshit with the best of them, and I play to my audience. There’s a concept in boxing that you fight to the level of your competition. You’re in with a big guy, you bring the fight. You’re in with a bum, you do just enough to win. But if you get lazy, then you put yourself at risk. I’ve always come to fight, from the very first page.

Interviewer: You do certain conventions of crime fiction particularly well. How do you go about writing a great interrogation scene?

James Ellroy: You have a good deal of information that needs to be conveyed to the reader. There has to be reluctance on the part of the suspect to give up that information. There has to be a level of coercion and guile in the interrogator. It has to be physically interesting. You have to be on the side of the interrogator, but at the same time you have to identify with the victim, and experience his horror at encountering official brutality. I’m thinking of a scene in White Jazz when Lieutenant Dave Klein is beating on some black guy who’s handcuffed to a chair. Klein says, I’m not enjoying this, but you’re not getting out of here unless you talk. But, of course, Klein is enjoying it. Most importantly, the scene can’t go on too long. It has to be fast.

Interviewer: Why do your interrogators always beat their suspects with phonebooks?

James Ellroy: Two reasons--they don’t leave marks and they don’t hurt your hands.

Interviewer: Some authors say that their characters are flesh and blood. Other authors say that they are puppets that the author moves around on the page.

James Ellroy: It’s disingenuous when writers say that they have no control over their characters, that they have a life of their own. Here’s what happens--you create the characters rigorously, and make clear choices about their behavior. You reach junctures in your stories and are confronted with dramatic options. You choose one or the other.

Interviewer: You take great pleasure in making your characters commit heinous acts, yet at the same time you rail against immorality. Is there a contradiction here?

James Ellroy: I can describe depravity without being depraved. I wrote My Dark Places, a memoir about my own slimiest actions, but I’ve refrained from such actions for many years. Breaking into houses was a thrill, peeping was a thrill. But these practices need to be curbed and regulated in order to ensure a safe society. There has been a great deal of chaos in my life, and there remains chaos in my creative life, so I crave order. This is what the superstructure of the novel allows me—ultimate authority in the creation of an ultimate order, even as I describe flagrant disorder in wondrous detail.

Interviewer: Are you religious?

James Ellroy: I’m a Christian. I’m a proponent of Judaism, and I see Judaism and Christianity as the through-lines of the rule of law in world history. I love the Reformation. I am of the Reformation—that moment when you stand alone with God. More than anything else, I am an enormous believer in God, the God who saved my wretched, tormented ass so many times. I feel that I have a responsibility to portray the spiritual, religious aspect of life. I hate squalor. I’m always astonished when people come up with the nutty idea that my books are nihilistic. I try to show the result of immoral actions--the karmic comeuppance, the horrible self-destructiveness. I explicate the dire consequences of historical and individual misdeeds. What happens to you when you do not know that virtue is its own reward.

Interviewer: How do you begin writing a novel?

James Ellroy: I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed, so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly.

Interviewer: What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark phase?

James Ellroy: I take notes. Ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline. The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book.

Interviewer: Your outlines resemble first drafts. Is that how you think of them?

James Ellroy: I think of the outline as a diagram, a superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a given scene.

Interviewer: Do you force yourself to write a certain number of words each day?

James Ellroy: I set a goal of outlined pages that I want to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel. The outline for Blood’s a Rover, which is three hundred and ninety-seven pages, is exponentially more detailed than the three-hundred-and-forty-five-page outline for The Cold Six Thousand. So the ratio of book pages to outline pages varies, depending on the density of the outline.

Interviewer: Is it important for you to have a steady writing routine?

James Ellroy: I need to work just as rigorously on the outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible, because the outline is there. Take today. I woke up early, at five-thirty. I worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky. Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.

Interviewer: Do you write at night?

James Ellroy: I write some nights, and I edit at night. I write by hand. I correct in red ink. When I’m close to finishing a book, I will write more and more, because I’ve got finishing fever.

Interviewer: Does it matter where you write?

James Ellroy: No, but this pad is perfectly outfitted. Some people find my place appalling. It’s too neat and clean. Nothing’s out of place. If you look in my clothes closet, you’ll see that everything is arrayed by fabric, style, and color. I’ll do anything I can to simplify my life.

Interviewer: Where does this obsession with order come from?

James Ellroy: Chaos in my early life, fear of incapacity and death, an attempt to control my overweaning emotionalism, my Beethovenian drives and lusts. I’ve become more single-minded as I’ve gotten older. My subsidiary obsessions have fallen by the wayside, with one big exception.

Interviewer: Women?

James Ellroy: Of course.

Interviewer: What happens after you finish writing a book?

James Ellroy: I go over it, editing fifty pages a day. I send it to a typist, who enters the changes. Then I proofread it once, make some more additions and subtractions. At that point, there are two sets of corrections. In copyediting, I continue to make small changes. Every opportunity that I have to reach perfection, I take.

Interviewer: What do you do once you have a draft that you’re happy with?

James Ellroy: I show it to my agent, Nat Sobel, who is a stickler for the logic of the dramatic scenes. He makes certain that each character’s motivations and actions are sensible. I’m a perfectionist. I go to great lengths to get it all right. It’s the biggest challenge I face when I’m writing. If you’re confused about something in one of my books, you’ve just got to realize, Ellroy’s a master, and if I’m not following it, it’s my problem. You just have to submit to me.

Interviewer: How do you conduct research for your novels?

James Ellroy: There was no research required for my first six novels. I made the stories up from scratch.

Interviewer: What about The Black Dahlia?

James Ellroy: The LAPD will not let civilians see the file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started working on the novel, I was still caddying. I was living in Westchester County and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four hundred bucks in quarters—that’s a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then I extrapolated a fictional story. The greatest source, however, was autobiography. Who’s Bucky Bleichert? He’s a tall, pale, and thin guy, with beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women, with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a woman’s death. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

Interviewer: Did you conceive of all four books in the LA Quartet at once?

James Ellroy: No, it was only when I decided to write The Big Nowhere that it became a quartet. Thus, the last three novels—The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were linked more closely with one another than with The Black Dahlia. My intention was to recreate the world that my mother lived and died in, as an homage to her, a conscious address to her, and a sensuous capitulation to her. I wanted to tell big love stories, big crime stories, and big political stories. I wanted to honor Elizabeth Short as the transmogrification of Jean Hilliker Ellroy. Whenever someone asks me what the LA Quartet books are about, I say, Bad men in love with strong women.

Interviewer: What kind of research did you do for the extended sections on the homosexual underworld in The Big Nowhere?

James Ellroy: I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin movie from 1980, Cruising. It has a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.

Interviewer: After the LA Quartet, you said you wanted to go in a more “mainstream” direction. I wonder what that word means to you.

James Ellroy: I realized that I had taken the police historical novel as far as it could go. I had written a series of masterworks about LA, so I decided to do the same thing with full-scale America. Hence, the Underworld USA Trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover. Most of all I credit Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo’s novel Libra was published in ’88. I was astounded by it. The book detailed the JFK snuff, largely through the eyes of that horribly persistent loser Lee Harvey Oswald. I said to myself, You can’t write this book—DeLillo got there first. He had created the entire metaphysical worldview of the Kennedy assassination. Jack Kennedy was responsible for his own death. His death was no more than the world’s most overglorified business-dispute killing, on a huge geopolitical scale. I was kicking myself that I didn’t come up with this idea first. And then, very slowly, I started to see that I could write a trio of novels, placing JFK’s death in an off-page context, with a giant social history of the United States to follow. When Knopf was slated to publish American Tabloid, I sent Mr. DeLillo a copy in advance to thank him for the influence. I included a thank-you note, telling him that I would attribute his contribution in all my big interviews. I got a very nice note back from Mr. DeLillo. He sent it on March 4, which is my birthday. It was 1995, but he incorrectly dated his note 1955, which seemed appropriate. He praised the book, and that was that.

Interviewer: Why, after American Tabloid, did you interrupt the trilogy and turn to a new form—the memoir?

James Ellroy: I was forty-five and very happily married. I was living in New Canaan, Connecticut. Life was good. For Christmas one year, my wife got me a photograph taken of me by the Los Angeles Times at the time of my mother’s death. She had it framed. She said, Do you remember this? And all of a sudden—boom. It was like a little knife to my heart. I thought I had locked my mother away after The Black Dahlia. A month later, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News told me he would be seeing my mother’s file, as part of a piece he was doing on unsolved San Gabriel Valley homicides. Immediately the opportunist in me said, I have to see my mother’s file and write a piece about it. GQ gave me the assignment. I visited the unsolved-homicide unit at the LA County sheriff’s office, and I met Sergeant Bill Stoner. We joked around a little bit and talked about other murder cases. I realized that I was avoiding looking at the file. Finally, he showed it to me. I looked at the pictures first. They weren’t terribly shocking, perhaps because I’d lived with the event mentally for so many years. Then I read the police reports and saw immediately how I would write the book. I knew that it would be my autobiography, my mother’s biography, and Bill Stoner’s biography. I knew I’d get a significant advance. I knew each of the book’s sections would begin with italicized addresses to my mother. I knew that we would try to find the killer. I knew that we wouldn’t find the killer. I knew we were going to get a lot of publicity, and that it wouldn’t help the case. The book would be about my journey to reconcile with my mother. And all of this came about just as I had thought it would.

Interviewer: How did Stoner become so central to the book?

James Ellroy: Because, like me, he was driven by a chivalrous notion of saving women in jeopardy. I identified with his emotional maturity, his intelligence, his resignation. He’s worldly, in the sense that he has a great knowledge of people, but he’s not in the least sophisticated. He says “excape” rather than “escape” and “eyetalian” rather than “Italian.” He has horrible taste in books and movies. But, God, does he know people. You don’t see that often.

Interviewer: For a novelist’s memoir, there is remarkably little about your own experience as a writer.

James Ellroy: That would be irrelevant to the main narrative, which was my mother and me. I did not want the book to be a discursive autobiography. I fear self-absorption as a writer. The book had to be about something more than me.

Interviewer: Has anything new happened in the case since the publication of the book?

James Ellroy: No. Bill Stoner and I continue to get phone calls, but nothing of real merit.

Interviewer: Is your mother as present in your life now as she was when you were writing the memoir?

James Ellroy: There is a quotation from Dylan Thomas that I think of often, “After the first death, there is no other.” He was writing about the firebombing of London, but for me the first death will always be my mother’s. She’s with me still, but no amount of effort will allow me to touch her concretely. I have fulfilled my moral debt to her to the best extent that I could. I have granted her a mythic status through my work. The price for that is public exposure. I am a gloryhound, I’ve always wanted to be famous. She never sought these things. I have a need to refract myself through her, and I owe her a deep spiritual debt.

Interviewer: There’s a line at the end of My Dark Places where you write, “She was no less than my salvation.” Salvation from what?

James Ellroy: From the horrifying, lustful, self-destructive aspects of my masculinity. She’s always there in the wings going, Ha-ha, you dipshit, you exploited my death, and now you’re doomed to have women kick the shit out of you the rest of your life. She also represents a powerful negative example. She’s an alcoholic, I’m an alcoholic. She never got sober, I did. She was a woman of the American fifties with appetites, and was harshly judged for indulging them. I would daresay that she indulged her appetites with a great deal more dignity than I have. I was a man in the sixties and seventies, and I got to drink and fuck with an abandon that she never dreamed of.

Interviewer: You’ve called yourself “the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,” and it’s difficult to think of another living writer who presents himself as aggressively as you do. How important is it for a writer to have swagger?

James Ellroy: You want swagger, look at Norman Mailer. I don’t go around beating people up. I’m just James Ellroy, the self-promoting demon dog. It comes naturally to me. You call it swagger, I call it joie de vivre.

Interviewer: You did say about Blood’s a Rover, “This book is going to be better than War and Peace.”

James Ellroy: Tongue-in-cheek. Wink, wink. The highest compliment ever paid to me was by Joyce Carol Oates. You know what she called me? The American Dostoyevsky. Stop right there, I’ll take it. Ultimately, I’m impervious to criticism. The ass kicking I got by a lot of critics for the style of The Cold Six Thousand was a real motherfucker, but I stopped reading the reviews. You can’t start thinking that critical consensus is a guarantor of quality. This is something I feel very strongly about. I remember that when L.A. Confidential went to the Cannes Film Festival, a critic from The Hollywood Reporter wrote a negative review. He just didn’t think the movie cohered. But by then all the other critics had loved the film, and this guy at The Hollywood Reporter had to join the club, so he included L.A. Confidential on his list of that year’s best films. The irony is that I think much of what he wrote in his original piece was actually dead-on.

Interviewer: L.A. Confidential marked a significant change in your writing. You adopted a “telegraphic style”—extremely short, clipped sentences. How did you come to this?

James Ellroy: When I handed in the novel, my editor told me I had to cut more than a hundred pages, without altering the thematic emphasis or shifting any of the specific scenes. Because the story was violent, and full of action, I saw the value of writing in a fast, clipped style. So I cut every unnecessary word from every sentence. I wrote White Jazz, the direct sequel to L.A. Confidential and the last book in the Quartet, in the first-person style, and in a normal, discursive voice. But it didn’t seem to fit the main character, Dave Klein—a fucked-up, racist cop bombing around black LA in ’58, who inexplicably gets hooked on bebop. I saw that if I eliminated words from his speech, I would develop a more convincing cadence for him--paranoid, jagged, enervated. I reverted to a more normal, albeit still terse style in American Tabloid and My Dark Places, but then I went back and did an extreme telegraphic style with The Cold Six Thousand.

Interviewer: Do you think the extreme style of The Cold Six Thousand was a success?

James Ellroy: Helen Knode, my second ex-wife, is my best friend and the greatest Ellroy scholar on earth. Helen said to me, Big Dog, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult. As a reader, you want less style and more emotion.

Interviewer: Did she tell you that before it was published?

James Ellroy: Yes. I ignored her.

Interviewer: It seems as if most sentences in that book are four words or fewer. It’s been called minimalistic.

James Ellroy: Minimalism implies small events, small people, a small story. Man, that’s the antithesis of me. Telegraphic means straight sentences—subject, verb, repetitions with slight modifications. The book has flaws. It’s too long, and the style is too rigorous for such a complicated story—the JFK assassination and its aftermath, the plotting of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, Howard Hughes’s takeover of Las Vegas, all told through the overlapping stories of three morally compromised and traumatized men desperately in love with strong women. It’s a big picaresque mess, and too demanding a read. But the stamina of it is sui generis. If you get it, you get it. It might not be your favorite of my books, but you can appreciate its scope, its audacity. I try to write books that no one else would have the balls to write. They require the reader’s intense concentration. Most writers, as they age, write shorter and tidier. My books are getting bigger and more stylistically ambitious. And my style will continue to evolve.

Interviewer: In Blood’s a Rover, as in many of your novels, several of your main characters undergo extreme shifts of allegiance—from fascistic reactionary, say, to Castroite leftist, and sometimes back again. Why?

James Ellroy: I wanted to dramatize the seismic shifts that took place during the sixties and seventies. I wanted to show the positive effects of ideological transformation. So I have two right-wing-toady assassins who can’t live with the horror of their misdeeds, chiefly the assassination of Martin Luther King. They are two men who embrace revolution, driven by a hope for redemption and by the women in their lives. It’s a more hopeful book than the others in the trilogy. As a character says at one point, Your options are do everything or do nothing. This novel also displays my greatest diversity of characterization. Karen Silfakis is a mother and a revolutionary. Marshell Bowen is a homosexual black man who goes undercover for the FBI. These characters think about their actions and analyze what they mean. They’re not afraid to write down their thoughts. There are a lot of diary entries and correspondence that give us different perspectives on American history between 1968 and 1972. It’s all about conveying the complex, ideological nature of that era.

Interviewer: When you’re writing about vast political events, do you have a particular political agenda in mind?

James Ellroy: No. I do have a complex relationship with authoritarianism. I’d rather live in a society that errs on the side of authoritarianism than a society that errs on the side of permissiveness. Try telling that to a woman and see if you get laid. But in my fiction, the two major arch-villains are authoritarian, reactionary conservatives; Dudley Smith, a corrupt LA policeman in the LA Quartet, and J. Edgar Hoover in the Underworld USA Trilogy. And the overarching moral voices of the trilogy are Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Interviewer: Where did you get the idea to introduce document inserts—FBI transcripts, tabloid copy, police reports—between chapters?

James Ellroy: Sometimes I need to get outside of the perspectives of the characters in order to convey information that they don’t know, and offer occasional editorial comments and historical facts in a compressed, direct way. That’s where the document inserts come in. It’s also a great excuse for me to write copy for Hollywood gossip rags.

Interviewer: As far as literary influences go, Confidential magazine seems a big one for you.

James Ellroy: I loved Confidential. Along with the Lutheran Church, it’s probably the biggest cultural influence of my life. Who’s a homo? Who’s a nympho? Who’s got a big one? Who’s got a small one? Who fucks people of color? Who’s getting head at the Griffith Park john? Who’s a muff diver? That shit was important to me then, and it’s important to me now.

Interviewer: You like to read your work before an audience. How do you prepare for the performance?

James Ellroy: I semimemorize the passage so that I can stand at the podium and share eye contact with the audience. I read shorter sections with as few differentiations in dialogue as possible. Never go long. Never try the audience’s patience. Never put in something too plot deep. Never hem, haw, pause, or do anything that isn’t dramatically effective. How many times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening. I walk in and situate myself. I hunker down and read something outrageous. Something with race, class, dope, sex, insane language. I read a section about rug burns—that’s when you’re fucking on a rug and you scrape your knees. Do you want to hear some candy-ass artiste saying, Oooooh, I’m an artist, my characters do things that I didn’t intend? Or do you want to hear about rug burns and get some yucks? I don’t read for more than fourteen minutes, tops. Then I answer questions for twenty minutes. Afterward, you don’t short-shrift anyone—you talk to everybody. You scope out the women. You have a gas. You’re happy, you’re grateful, you’re God’s guy.

Interviewer: You claim not to read books anymore, yet you seem extremely well-read. How do you account for that?

James Ellroy: There are big gaps in my literary knowledge. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I haven’t read anything by William Gaddis or James Baldwin. I tried to read True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, because I met him, but I didn’t buy his style. I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks? I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book and saw that there were six or seven consecutive pages in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant. My name isn’t Juan Ellroy, OK?

Interviewer: You’ve been criticized at times for being racially insensitive. Why do you think that is?

James Ellroy: Critics want racism, and secondarily homophobia, to be portrayed as a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. Racist language uttered by sympathetic characters confuses hidebound liberals. Who gives a shit?

Interviewer: Are your books received differently abroad?

James Ellroy: I’m a god in Europe—the dominant American writer of our time. And that’s no shit. America is the cultural top of the world, and my books are viewed in Europe as realistic critiques of America—at least by those Europeans who worship and loathe America equally and wish they were Americans and wonder why they’re not the height of culture for the entire world. I sell more books in France than in America.

Interviewer: You’ve talked about your competitive instinct. Who do you feel you’re competing against?

James Ellroy: No one. I’m only fighting myself. I have a duty to God and to the people who love my books, and that is to get better and better. At this stage of the game, I’m entirely self-referential.

Interviewer: Is posterity important to you?

James Ellroy: It is. I don’t want to die. And I’m not going to.

[frenchkisst]

‘It’s been life-changing for me — to say the least’

When Joseph’s weight hit an all-time high of 385 pounds (or 175 kilos), he decided enough was enough. To turn his health around, he started following a keto diet and intermittent fasting.

In just eight months, Joseph lost 137 pounds (or 62 kilos). Not only did he lose the weight, but he also noticed the pain he formerly experienced in his joints had largely disappeared.

Here, Joseph shares the inspiring results he’s gotten since starting keto and fasting. He describes his low-carb journey as “life-changing.”

Joseph’s story

Hello Diet Doctor!

My name is Joseph, I’m 41, and I’m from Indiana, USA.

As of October 22, 2019, I weighed a whopping 385 pounds (or 175 kilos). At that point, I had trouble just moving around and putting my shoes on was a chore in itself.

Growing up, I was always fit. I played sports and was also in the marines. Years later, I found myself never watching what I ate or drank — and the weight just piled on.

Before I knew it, I was at 385 pounds (or 175 kilos). I saw that 400-pound (or 181-kilo) mark coming soon. I just couldn’t believe it and finally refused to live like that anymore.

I read and listened to podcasts with keto and fitness experts. For example, I listened to “FoundMyFitness” by Dr. Rhonda Patrick, as well as, those featuring Dr. Dominic D’Agostino, one of the leading researchers in the field of ketosis.

From October 22, 2019, to June 22, 2020, I lost 137 pounds (or 62 kilos) with keto and intermittent fasting. I’ll keep going to my goal of reaching 200 pounds (or 91 kilos). It’s been life-changing for me — to say the least.

Eating keto has helped me to feel so much better! I used to have inflammation in all of my joints, especially in my shoulders, and I could hardly raise my arms above my head without experiencing pain. Now, my lower back pain, knee pain, and feet all feel tremendously better.

What Joseph ate before and what he eats now

What I ate before keto was, well … everything. I couldn’t count how many Mountain Dews I drank a day. Had I attempted to keep track, I’m sure the intake of sugar from soda alone would have scared me. For food, I ate pretty much all fast food and pizza — and everything I ate was full of carbs.

These days, with fasting, I start eating around noon and stop around 8 pm. Surprisingly, with fasting, my hunger and cravings have gone down a lot. My go-to is usually eggs, steak, ground beef, or slow cooking chicken in a crockpot. Usually, I prepare batches of food that will last me for a few days.

I drink about half a gallon (or two liters) of water a day as well.

Comment

Congrats on your amazing progress, Joseph! Thank you for sharing your story with us and I am glad we can help you on your journey. Keep up the great work! Best, / Dr. Bret Scher

Ready to lose the weight for good?

Our new 10-week program helps you lose weight in a healthy and sustainable way.

Sign up now!

Most popular success stories

"I am the absolute happiest I have ever been. Ever." 

'The beauty of this lifestyle is the effortless maintenance' 

“Within one year of going keto I was prescription-free for the first time in decades!” 

All success stories

Women under 40

Women over 40

Men under 40

Men over 40

Share your story

Do you have a success story you want to share on this blog? Send it (photos appreciated) to success@dietdoctor.com, and please let us know if it’s OK to publish your photo and name or if you’d rather remain anonymous. It would also be greatly appreciated if you shared what you eat in a typical day, whether you fast etc. More information:

Share your story!

More

Keto for beginners

How to lose weight

Keto

Keto for beginners: Introduction

08:02

Learn how to do a keto diet right, in part 1 of our video course.

"I'll do this or I'm going to die trying"

19:23

Kristie Sullivan struggled with her weight for her whole life in spite of trying every diet imaginable, but then she finally lost a 120 pounds and improved her health on a keto diet.

Part 2 of eating keto with Kristie: Build a keto plate

11:16

Are you confused about what a plate of keto food should look like? Then this part of the course is for you.

Part 1 of eating keto with Kristie: Introduction

01:47

One of the hardest parts of starting a keto diet is figuring out what to eat. Fortunately, Kristie will teach you in this course.

Part 3 of eating keto with Kristie: Know your portion sizes

15:29

Kristie teaches us how to eyeball the right amounts of fat, protein and carbs in order to ensure that we can easily stay within ketogenic ratios.

Fat Chance

1:05:43

Is it possible to ride a pushbike across the Australian continent (2,100 miles) without eating carbs?

Keto and fast food

10:28

Can you get low-carb food at fast-food restaurants? Ivor Cummins and Bjarte Bakke went to a number of fast-food restaurants to find out.

Eating keto to survive cancer

28:51

Audra Wilford on the experience of using a ketogenic diet as part of treating her son Max’s brain tumor.

Is lower insulin the key to better brain health?

46:36

What is the root cause of the Alzheimer's epidemic – and how should we intervene before the disease is fully developed?

All things keto with Keto Connect

16:44

What is it like running the very popular YouTube channel Keto Connect?

A life without migraines

15:44

Elena Gross' life was completely transformed with the ketogenic diet.

A new life with a keto diet

13:38

If your muscles can't use stored glycogen, is it then a good idea to eat a high-carb diet to compensate for this? Or can a keto diet help treat these rare glycogen storage diseases?

Exploiting cancer metabolism with ketosis

44:42

Can a ketogenic diet be used in cancer treatment? Dr. Angela Poff at the Low Carb USA 2016.

LCHF and diabetes: science and clinical experience

45:59

What is the root of the problem in type 2 diabetes? And how can we treat it? Dr. Eric Westman at the Low Carb USA 2016.

80 pounds lighter and no medications

09:12

Is it possible to reverse your diabetes with the help of a strict low-carb diet? Definitely, and Stephen Thompson did it.

My success story with Jim Caldwell

02:23

Jim Caldwell has transformed his health and gone from an all-time high at 352 lbs (160 kg) to 170 lbs (77 kg.

Challenging the dogma

16:47

Dr. Priyanka Wali tried a ketogenic diet and felt great. After reviewing the science she started recommending it to patients.

Diet Doctor Podcast #35 with Ben Bikman, PhD

00:00

Why is insulin so important for us to control and why does a ketogenic diet help so many people? Professor Ben Bikman has studied these questions in his lab for years and he is one of the foremost authorities on the subject.

Treating cancer with a keto diet

17:07

Can a strict keto diet help prevent or even treat some cancers, like brain cancer?

Tips for eating out - part 5 of eating keto with Kristie

10:10

Do you find it difficult to stay on your keto plan when you're dining out and still don't want to miss out on those lovely moments with friends and family? Then this episode is for you.

Low-carb living

1:00:21

How do you successfully eat low carb for life? And what’s the role of ketosis? Dr. Stephen Phinney answers these questions.

My success story with Gillian Szollos

02:55

Gillian had a normal life when she all of a sudden started to get seizures. She suffered terrible side effects from the meds so she started a keto diet.

How to formulate a low-carb keto diet

48:32

Low-carb pioneer Dr. Eric Westman talks about how to formulate an LCHF diet, low carb for different medical conditions and common pitfalls among others.

Diet Doctor Podcast #31 – Dr. Ken Berry

51:26

Dr. Ken Berry wants us all to be aware that much of what our doctors say may be a lie. Maybe not an outright malicious lie, but much of what “we” believe in medicine can be traced back to word-of-mouth teachings without a scientific basis.

Weight loss

How to maximize fat burning

03:52

Dr. Fung's fasting course part 2: How do you maximize fat burning? What should you eat – or not eat?

The 5 common mistakes on LCHF

09:25

Is it hard to reach your goal weight, are you hungry or do you feel bad? Make sure you're avoiding these mistakes.

"I'll do this or I'm going to die trying"

19:23

Kristie Sullivan struggled with her weight for her whole life in spite of trying every diet imaginable, but then she finally lost a 120 pounds and improved her health on a keto diet.

My success story with Kenneth Russell

02:52

When Kenneth turned 50, he realized that he wouldn't make it to 60 the way he was going.

My success story with Chuck Hicks

02:39

At nearly 500 lbs (230 kg) Chuck could barely move at all anymore. It wasn’t until he found a keto diet that thing started to change.

Is obesity caused by too much insulin?

25:27

Is obesity mainly caused by the fat storing hormone insulin? Dr. Ted Naiman answers this question.

Pie-making champion goes low carb

03:23

Learn how this pie-making champion went low carb and how it changed his life.

The pathways of insulin resistance

30:41

Are we chasing the wrong guy when it comes to heart disease? And if so, what is the real culprit in the disease?

Living low carb with Yvonne Lane

05:51

Yvonne used to see all those pictures of people who'd lost so much weight, but sometimes didn't really believe they were real.

Carb-Loaded

1:14:40

This may be the best (and funniest) low-carb movie ever. At least it's a strong contender.

The cause of obesity

38:45

What is the real cause of obesity? What causes weight gain? Dr. Jason Fung at Low Carb Vail 2016.

How to think about how to eat — Gary Taubes

30:34

In this presentation from the Low Carb Denver conference, the amazing Gary Taubes talks about the conflicting dietary advice we are given and what to make of it all.

Part 7 of Dr. Jason Fung's diabetes course

05:01

Dr. Fung gives us a comprehensive review of what causes fatty liver disease, how it affects insulin resistance and, what we can do to reduce fatty liver.

How to motivate your patients

50:25

In this presentation from Low Carb Denver 2019, Drs. David and Jen Unwin explain how physicians can finetune the art of practicing medicine with strategies from psychology to help their patients reach their goals.

Insulin toxicity — Dr. Jason Fung's diabetes course

09:03

Dr. Fung looks at the evidence on what high levels of insulin can do to one’s health and what can be done to lower insulin naturally.

The perfect treatment for diabetes and weight loss

45:20

Do doctors treat type 2 diabetes completely wrong today – in a way that actually makes the disease worse?

My success story with Katrin Crum

02:45

Katrin was diagnosed as being morbidly obese, and was suffering from a number of health issues. She had tried a lot of different diets over the years but nothing had worked long term.

What to do instead of counting calories

16:02

Why is counting calories useless? And what should you do instead to lose weight?

The hidden costs of medications

44:51

Can medications prevent or hinder your efforts to lose weight and become healthy? Jackie Eberstein at the Low Carb Cruise 2016.

A global food revolution

34:30

The mistakes behind the obesity epidemic and how we can fix them together, empowering people everywhere to revolutionize their health.

Are all calories the same?

20:04

Are all calories created equally – regardless of whether they come from a low-carb, low-fat or a vegan diet?

My Big Fat Diet

42:31

What would happen if an entire town of First Nation people went back to eating the way they used to? A high-fat low-carb diet based on real food?

80 pounds lighter and no medications

09:12

Is it possible to reverse your diabetes with the help of a strict low-carb diet? Definitely, and Stephen Thompson did it.

My success story with Jim Caldwell

02:23

Jim Caldwell has transformed his health and gone from an all-time high at 352 lbs (160 kg) to 170 lbs (77 kg.

Support

Do you want to support Diet Doctor and get access to bonus material? Check out our membership.

Start your free trial here

The post ‘It’s been life-changing for me — to say the least’ appeared first on Diet Doctor.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 11634933 https://ift.tt/2ZzKG1R

[mymelodyheart]

Forget Me Not Chapter 2 ~Homeward Bound~

“For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”

2015

He cocked his head to listen if anyone was in the corridor. Satisfied nobody was about, he cautiously snuck into Claire's old bedroom and shut the door firmly behind him. After carefully placing a vase of forget-me-not flowers on the desk, Jamie noticed not much had changed in her room since she left Lallybroch. On one wall was a massive poster of the world map, on the wooden beam above, hung an assortment of dreamcatchers, and on her bed was a collection of stuff toys he had given her over the years. After a brief glance at the bookshelves filled with classic literature and travel books, his eyes wandered to her dressing table. Slotted in the frames of the mirror were a collection of photos, and they were mostly of him, William and Jenny. He smiled as he peeked at each snapshot, conjuring memories from their childhood. He wished he had a more recent photo of her, but that was one thing Claire never granted him as she was never keen to have her picture taken. Although she was active on social media, most of her posts were images of places she had visited, wildlife, food and the odd time her feet, to show off her new trekking shoes.

Over the years, he thought of her often even in times when he was in relationships. How could he stop thinking of her when Claire would faithfully send postcards, cards during special occasions and made-up occasions, and also ridiculous souvenirs that served no purpose except to clutter his apartment. But he kept every damn thing she had ever sent him. In return, he would send her favourite hardback books with forget-me-not flowers pressed into the pages and occasionally a bottle of single malt whisky so she wouldn't miss home too much. 

Every Christmas and a couple of weeks in summer, Claire would come to visit Lallybroch, but Jamie was never there to see her, for the most part, because those times were his busiest at work in France. And whenever he came home, either she was studying in Switzerland, or she was on some adventure with her backpack in some faraway places. Once, only once they had an opportunity to meet in London airport for their connecting flights when she was bound for Scotland, and he was returning to France. Even that chance meeting went awry when Jamie's flight was delayed departing Edinburgh. But today she was coming home, and it would be the first time they will see each other in six years. This time she was staying for good and so was he. 

..........

"God ah hate regional trains! Are we nearly there yet?" Geillis muttered as she slumped on her seat and stretched her legs in front of her. They have been travelling on the train from London for four hours already. "Remind me again why we took the train instead of flying."

Claire closed her book and sighed at her friend. "If we had booked a flight, we would have had to wait for two more days, and I can't wait that long. All the cheap flights were fully booked, and I wasn't prepared to pay a few extra hundred pounds to fly from city to city. I know how you're feeling, Geillis... I can hardly wait to get there myself. I'm even finding it hard to concentrate on reading, thinking of seeing my family again. God, I've missed them." Looking at her watch, she smiled. "Not long to go now... an hour and a half... more or less." 

In actual fact, she had been thinking of Frank for the most part of the journey, and the thought of him made her stomach do somersaults. Claire had seen him the summer before when she came to visit Lallybroch, and she couldn't forget the appreciative look he had given her way when they met at the local pub. He seemed surprised as if he was seeing her for the very first time. And if her instinct is anything to go by, Claire believed Frank loved what he saw.

"What's with the secret smile, Claire? Is it Frank?" Geillis cheeks dimpled as her lips curled into a puckish smile.

Claire grinned. "You know me too well. Yes, alright yes I've been thinking about him, but I'm also thrilled to be seeing my family again, especially Jamie...I haven't seen him for years. God, I've missed him." She paused as she summoned memories from the past before continuing. "Just between the two of us, Jamie is my favourite out of the three siblings. I love them all, but Jamie is the best. Maybe because we're closest in age and we get along so well. As for Jenny, she used to fuss over me a lot, and when I got older, it became annoying. Well, Willie is great too, but he was always so grown up. He rarely played with me when I was little, but in my teens, he spent more time with me when ma and da were busy in the hotel. On weekends he used to take Jamie and me to movies and such, while Jenny was more interested in staying at home and pottering about. "

Thinking back to her childhood memories, the Fraser family was the greatest gift her uncle Lamb had ever given her. Although Claire felt like an outsider in her school and was often taunted for being English, the love her foster family had for her outweighed the heartaches. Her happiest memories were within Lallybroch and days spent with the Frasers. Even though she lost her parents at such a young age and then later, her uncle Lamb, in her heart and in her mind, despite what her schoolmates made her feel, she was never an orphan.

"Here, hand me yer IPad. Ah want tae see pictures of your folk again, sae ah ken who is who."

Claire shifted seats next to Geillis, and opening her IPad, she tapped into the gallery icon. After a few swipes on the screen, she found what she was looking for. "This one here is the last photo of all of us together under one roof. This was taken before Jamie went to a culinary college in France. I was sixteen here. Willie here was on holiday from his training as a chef in Italy. And Jenny, she's the only one who stayed at home. She never had any interest in the hotel, restaurant or further studies. Though she did go to University in Edinburgh to study Business Management. Da said she was born to be a housewife because she loved running the household and cooking." 

"So you're the youngest? You look sae different in this photo...maybe it's the glasses ye were wearing and your hair was shorter."

"Yes, I'm the youngest. Jamie is now 25, Jenny 28 and Willie is 30. I was the baby then and was spoiled rotten when I first came to Lallybroch. Yea, I got rid of the specs after ma convinced me to wear contact lenses because I kept losing them or breaking them. As for my hair, I realised the curls aren't as wild if I kept my hair longer. I hated my hair back then and wished I had Jenny's straight hair. " Claire swiped past more pictures to a more recent one. "This one is from last year, just the Fraser kids."

"Holy mammy of God, are these Jamie an' Willie? They're sae tall an' Jenny is sae wee. Mmm such good looking lads if ah may say sae."

Claire laughed. "I don't know why Jenny is so small. Everyone else in the family is tall, even ma. Jenny and Willie take more after da with their dark hair and blue eyes. As you can see here, Jamie looks more like ma... he's ginger just like you, but he does have his father's eyes."

"Mmm...Jamie looks scrumptious, and he's more buff than Willie. Is he single? You wouldna mind if ah tried tae angle for a date? Unless of course, ye want him for yersel'"

"Don't be daft! He's my brother...and if he falls for you and ends up marrying you, it's like we're going to be sisters. Now wouldn't that be fab? And yes, he's definitely single. He broke up with his French girlfriend a few months back. He never really liked to discuss his relationships with me, and all I know is that he reckons Frenchie wasn't the right girl for him."

Claire loved Jamie with all her heart, and she had time and again reminded him that he will always be her best friend. He had consistently made her feel special, especially on the night when Frank cancelled their dance date when she was fifteen. He had planned to go with his friends after the dance, but instead, he went with her and Willie, stopping by a gas station to buy a tub of her favourite vanilla ice cream. When they arrived home, they both tucked into their treat sitting on the outside balcony, wrapped in a blanket and looking at the stars. Claire always loved looking at the stars, and she thought it was the most beautiful thing. Then she remembered him saying to her softly as he fed her a spoon of ice cream, "Next time you think of beautiful things, don't forget to count yourself in." 

"So does Jamie have a type?" Geillis asked as she enlarged a photo of Jamie on Claire's IPad.

"Funny you ask that. He always told me he prefers brunettes, but his past two girlfriends were blondes. Blokes are funny that way, aren't they? They say one thing and do another, and yet Jamie always told me women are the most complicated creatures. Tsk, men!"

Geillis closed the IPad and handed it back to Claire. "Weel 'tis braw tae be back in Scotland an' I'm sae glad ah will be workin' wi' ye and yer family. How is yer da tae work for?" Geillis asked, straightening up from her seat to rummage for some snacks in her satchel.

"Oh, da is great, you will love him. I spent summer as a kid doing odd jobs at the hotel...helping in the kitchen, in housekeeping and such. I enjoyed it so much that I proceeded to study Hotel Management instead of nursing."

Claire and Geillis met while fulfilling their apprenticeship in a five-star hotel in Munich, Germany. Once their training came to an end, Geillis had planned to apply for a job in New York hoping Claire would follow suit. But Claire declined as she had promised Brian, her foster father, she would come back to work for Fraser Manor Inn once her studies and training were over. As Geillis was intrigued by the Frasers' hotel and wanted to be closer to her friend, instead of going to New York, she applied for the Front Office position with the help and recommendation from Claire, which Brian Fraser accepted.

Jamie and Willie have returned home to Lallybroch a few months back to help with the preparations for the Grand Opening after the hotel went through a major restoration. It was a pact they all made that they would one day return home to work for the family business. Claire had, at first, wanted to travel to Mexico after her apprenticeship had ended. But since the Grand Opening of the hotel is imminent, she decided to come home earlier than planned.

Fraser Manor Inn, having only thirty rooms, is not by any standard grand but more traditional of the Highlands. The pièce de résistance  of the hotel was the restaurant, and the food was very sought after for its exceptionally high standard in taste, presentation and creativity, promoting Scottish fresh and local produce. The head chef Murtagh Fraser, god-father to all Fraser children had earned the restaurant a Michelin three stars; hence, his cantankerous manner was put up by Brian and Ellen. Working alongside Murtagh in the kitchen would be the Fraser boys; William as the Sous-Chef and Jamie as Chef de Pâtissier.

"Weel, I'll give it a go for a year, and I hope yer da will give me a fantastic certificate tae add tae my resume. When does the hotel re-open?"

"Hopefully before Christmas. So you'll have plenty of time to familiarise yourself with the locals and local delights. Da says you can stay in Lallybroch until you find your own place. Otherwise, he has a couple of apartments for rent...normally he rents them out to staff. It's supposed to be for one of us in case we tire of living in Lallybroch."

"Oh good, plenty of time to get to know the local boys before we start work. Or let's say, plenty of time to get to know yer brothers, " Geillis said, her eyes twinkling mischievously.

..........

Jamie and Willie were standing on the platform, waiting for the train to come to a halt and for Jamie, it seemed to take eternally before the screeching and clunking on the beaten old track ceased. The air felt nippy, and although it was only mid-afternoon, it was quickly turning dark. It was a perfect homecoming for Claire, Jamie thought, as autumn was her favourite season. He smiled to himself as he thought of Jenny and his mother preparing Claire's favourite meal of Beef Wellington, thick gravy, roast potatoes and vegetables. Willie had offered to cook, suggesting a more elegant dish, but the Fraser women had shooed him away. Earlier in the day, while nobody was in, Jamie snuck in the kitchen and made Claire's favourite dessert of Raspberry Mille Feuille and Sherry Trifle much to Jenny's annoyance. He had to make it as it was the only request Claire had of him when he asked what she wanted when she came home.

The whoosh of the sliding doors of the train carriages brought Jamie back to the present. As his older brother started to move forward, he followed, looking up and down the platform for a ginger-haired lassie and a curly-haired brunette. There were plenty of people disembarking eager to get off, and others, keen to get on board and out of the cold. The brothers strained their necks watching out for the girls, and it was Willie who saw them first.

"Claire! Over here!" Willie shouted as he started to jog forward.

"Oh my God, Willie...I'm finally home! So good to see you!" Claire squealed as she flung herself to his older brother's arms, while the ginger-haired lass stood back and observed the scene with amusement.

Jamie waited patiently, not wanting to disturb their moment as he leaned on a pillar watching the scene before him. He watched her squeal some more and giggle as Claire introduced Willie to her friend Geillis, babbling and swinging her rucksack onto her back as she went along.   Ah Dhia, she's more beautiful than ever.  Gone was the awkward and shy teenage girl he remembered but instead there stood a bubbly gorgeous young woman full of self-confidence and most importantly, happy to be home.

"Where's Jamie? I thought ma said he was coming with you." Claire asked, looking slightly disappointed.

"Right here, Sassenach," he replied, stepping away from the shadows and opening his arms for an imminent embrace.

She spun around to the direction of his voice, her eyes widening in surprise before her face broke into a most stunning smile he'd ever seen. Gone were her braces and in place were perfectly even teeth. "Jamie!!!" Claire wasted no time and ran up to him.

Jamie lifted her and hugged her tightly as they both laughed and spoke at the same time, of how they missed each other. Jamie didn't let go, and Claire wrapped her legs around his waist to keep her balance, as she rained loud kisses on his cheek. "Fancy a piggyback for ol' times sake?" Jamie suggested, grinning.

Claire nodded her head animatedly, her smile never leaving her face.

Without much effort, Jamie grabbed her hips and shifted her to his back without her feet touching the ground. Once she was safely behind him, her arms around his neck and legs around his middle, Jamie grabbed Claire's duffel back and turned around to his brother. "I'll race ye to the car!" Jamie shouted as he ran off.

Willie laughed at their carry on as he watched Jamie zig-zagged on the platform, Claire's laughter echoing in the air while Geillis face was one of astonishment. "Don't mind them, they've always been like that..." Willie confessed, shaking his head as he chuckled to himself.

"Brother my arse...he's got the hots for her," Geillis muttered to herself, as she watched Jamie and Claire disappeared into the crowd.

"Pardon me...you were saying?" Willie turned to pick up the rest of the bags as he smiled at Geillis.

"Nothing."

"I don't want to race Jamie to the car, but you can tell me how your trip was from London..."